A NEWPORT costume designer is putting the tailoring skills taught to him by his mother to good use, designing costumes for film and television including Big Brother and Dr Who.

Andrew Carragon, 32, makes costumes for television, film and theatre, specialising in Edwardian and Victorian designs.

The family business goes back to 1877 and Mr Carragon has been at the helm for ten years.

The youngest of eight children, Mr Carragon was taught to sew from being a toddler, before studying textiles secondary school.

He is the only sibling to make a career out of design.

When Mr Carragon, of Grosmont Way, took over the reins at Media Costume, they mostly did work at Victorian and Edwardian fairs across the country.

But in 2006, he got a call from Celebrity Big Brother asking him to design costumes for a task in the programme.

He has since designed costumes for a range of television programmes, including Dr Who, as well as independent films, renowned photographer Lorna Freytag and Italian Vogue magazine.

In 2007, he signed up to a website called peopleperhour.com, which gives people from different backgrounds to sell their skills online, and employers also use it as a way to find a person or business for a specific job.

"It's one of the resources to use like a fishing net to source projects. It has been a really good thing, because the knock-on effect of sending your CV out is more people get to know about us and we pick up all sorts of jobs," he said.

He does the majority of the designs and tailoring himself, occasionally bringing in help for a big project and costumes can take anything from a day-and-a-half to one week to complete, depending on the intricacy.

It seems design and tailoring is in his blood and Mr Carragon said it is world away from his previous job of working in catering: "You never know who's going to call or what e-mails you're going to get, it's the excitement of sewing and designing from the beginning to the end."

  • To see more designs, log-on to www.mediacostume.co.uk