If sorting through your sock drawer for a matching pair poses a daunting task, try finding a single costume in a sea of thousands.

It would be easy to assume Jayne Ball-Saret’s entire year could revolve around a single day; but for the proprietor of Grand Ball Costumes, providing literally thousands of outfits throughout the country is a year-round occupation.

While many may associate her shop solely with Halloween, Ball-Saret has made a career and lifestyle out of her love of theater by providing costumes to musicals, stage productions and masked Hallows Eve revelers alike. As she put it, her job is a “dream come to life everyday.”

For nine years, Ball-Saret has owned and operated Grand Ball Costumes and has created thousands of outfits ranging from characters from “The Lord of the Rings” to clothing for stage productions like “Our Town” and “Mame.”

Nestled on a hill just south of the Square, Grand Ball Costumes is a seemingly unassuming location until patrons walk through the door to see rows of grotesque masks, props, novelties and a sewing machine and ironing board squeezed behind a counter in the shop’s back corner. The shop, much like Ball-Saret’s career and attitude, permeates fun.

Ball-Saret said this element of amusement is essential to the shop and all of her work.

“We wanted the shop to be bright and perky and fun because the customers who come in here are all fun; and if they’re not fun they don’t belong in my store,” Ball said with a devilish smile. “If they don’t have a sense of humor, ‘buh bye;’ no jerks in this business.”

Ball-Saret, who graduated from Eastern in 1977 with a bachelors degree in theater arts and earned a master’s degree in related arts in 1983, has been infatuated with varying aspects of theater and design since childhood when she first learned to sew and began singing.

“My mom put me in 4-H when I was nine. And that’s how I learned to sew and then I was trying to find that niche,” she said.

Her niche, as she put it, included the aforementioned singing and grew to include acting, directing and her eventual career in design. With degrees from Eastern, Ball-Saret decided Charleston offered everything she wanted in a small town. Her home town of Collinsville was more of a bustling city, while Charleston offered all of the advantages of bucolic rural living.

“I went to school (at Eastern) and just stayed,” she said. “What I liked about (Charleston) the most was low crime, low traffic, low smog and low violence. People complain about nothing to do here. But the point is you’re an hour or two from anything you want to do.”

Odd jobs pay the bills

Before Grand Ball Costumes could become a career, however, Ball-Saret worked a series of jobs that utilized her theater background, but often simply paid the bills while she worked costume design part time. One of those “full-time, bill-paying jobs” was with Illinois Consolidated Telephone, where Ball-Saret provided the voice for a now defunct touch-a-topic service.

“I had done a lot of voice work because of my theater background. And I got paid to act like a professional businesswoman,” she said. “More than anything, it was an acting job.”

It was during this time Ball was designing costumes for local stage productions to make money on the side. While her day job may have provided income, the stage still beckoned despite the fear of not being able to support herself designing costumes.

“I was always afraid of not being able to support myself doing it,” Ball-Saret said of her earlier years designing. “It was only after having a full-time job to support myself and having more orders than I could fill that I realized I could do this and survive.”

The perfect location

After quitting her job with the phone company, Ball-Saret set out to look for the appropriate shop. Not only would she need a good location, Ball-Saret said she required a small shop front and a huge warehouse to store her costumes. After a great deal of searching, Ball-Saret’s realtor informed her of a local plumbing shop that might be perfect. After further inspection, Ball-Saret decided the former Brown’s Plumbing offered the necessary space to run her shop and store thousands of future outfits.

With a series of remodeling efforts, Grand Ball Costumes was born. In order to publicize her business and build a cache of costumes, Ball-Saret set up a series of creative deals with local theater groups and schools.

Her agreements entailed the organization putting on the play paying for materials and time while Ball-Saret would keep and store her creations for herself. This way, as she put it, the schools wouldn’t have to store the costumes and Ball-Saret would keep the outfits on hand for future use. This allowed her to quickly amass costumes year by year while still making money for creating them.

Now, nine years later, Ball-Saret provides costumes for more than 80 shows throughout the nation annually.

A visit to her shop reveals a woman well suited to her profession. Quick to smile with an infectious laugh, Ball-Saret often has the air of a proud mother when speaking of, or showing off, her handiwork.

The consummate designer

“I’m the designer. I’ve made 90 percent of what you see here, and there are three more floors just as full,” she said while jaunting down a flight of stairs in the back of her store to reveal countless racks of costumes reaching from floor to ceiling.

It is only after wandering through the catacombs of her warehouse that the volume with which Ball-Saret deals is truly comprehensible. Through three levels, racks fill the cement floors and are broken only by narrow pathways leading from one rack to another.

“These are the racks of costumes for shows that haven’t gone yet this year that I’m still working on alterations,” she said with an air of accomplishment while giving a tour. “We’re busy for Halloween, but this is what I do all year.”

For the month of October, Ball-Saret’s shop is decked out for Halloween, with hundreds of items lining the walls, counters and shelves. The shop rents costumes for $30 to $50 and also sells individual items as props or accents to the costumes available in the store.

While plays and musicals provide the bulk of her business during the year, Ball-Saret said she is busiest during Halloween when her typical one-woman shop is inhabited by a handful of employees and an array of customers.

“It goes in seasons for me because most of my customers are schools or theaters,” she said. “In the fall there’s Halloween and plays, and the spring means musicals. I close in January and do my taxes and all the stuff I don’t like to do.”

Building business strategy

As to her business strategy for nearly the past decade, Ball-Saret chalks it up to providing a service her customers need and then building her business on networking a reputation. Although theater in Central Illinois may not be booming, Ball-Saret is able to ship costumes nationally through her Web site.

“The networking that works great for me is Eastern students,” she said with a wry smile. “They graduate, and they go teach, and they go out into the world, and they’re all my little salesmen.”

For now, her business may be dominated by ghoulish costumes and college revelers, but the rest of the year means providing a vast array of every stage costume imaginable. It is this variety, however, Ball-Saret seems to enjoy most.

“It’s always something I wanted to do,” she said of her profession. “It’s hard work, but it’s work I love and I wouldn’t do anything else.”