THE HOOD
Catasta Charisma
(Printed book £40 plus p&p; downloadable
PDF £25)
Reviewed by Heidi Patterson

This review of The Hood completes my evaluations of Catasta Charisma’s trilogy (so far) of substantial manuals on latex design and crafting.

The Hood, published in 2017 and running to 200 pages, was the first of the three manuals. Catasta — aka Heath Clark — followed it in 2018 with The Compendium of Rubber Garment Making, a weighty 668-page tome reviewed for our June 2018 cover story.

The Hood is available in printed book form or downloadable PDF, while its Compendium sequel and his newest manual, the 530-page Working with Latex (our December 2019 cover story) come in PDF format only.

And so to The Hood — subject of this review. A decent hood is probably the toughest garment to get right in latex, which helps explain the typically months-long waiting times from designers who do get them right.

The demand for properly tailored hoods far exceeds the supply of them — and of artists able to craft them consistently. Heath is characteristically honest about his own struggles in this department.

He says: “After approximately a thousand pages of writing I had come to understand a lot about how two-dimensional scraps of fabric could be shaped into three-dimensional forms that would fit the body.

“But one particular garment, the hood, was always elusive. I had made hoods; I’d had my head wrapped in tape on which seams were then drawn, the sections cut up and the tape peeled off my head to leave me with templates.

“But I didn’t have a real concept of how to make such templates through drawing them from body measurements. Eventually, however, things began to click.

“The more things I made and the more I wrote about how the things were made, the clearer things became. Out of all this came this book.”

NO PAMPHLET OF PREMADE PATTERNS

In his foreword to The Hood, Heath stresses that it isn’t a pamphlet with premade patterns.

“Instead,” he explains, “it’s a book that attempts to show you how you can make any particular style of hood you might wish to.

“From this book you could literally make hundreds of different styles, and to any set of measurements.

“It is therefore a book for those people more interested in wanting to learn how to make hoods and not for those who simply want to make a hood.

“The book requires you to make your own pattern but I have endeavoured to make this as simple as I can because I know it can seem incredibly daunting.”

So you’ve been warned, straight off the bat. But this book, like the most patient tutor, will guide you through every step, and anchor you in the essentials that any hood maker will have to learn perfectly in order to get the basics right.

There are seemingly zillions of special measurements you will learn to take and record before these essential elements can be plotted on paper to form your template.