“Back then, we had an eight-hour work day, although we most often worked 10 to 15 hours a day.” She added, “I did not mind that, and I also wasn’t tired, because I was enjoying what I was doing.”

   She also met her husband, David Campbell, at the ballet. 

   She said, “It is nice when you marry someone you have worked with.  They understand the demands and passion of the job.”

   Campbell recalls one time when she was really busy and told David she would not be home until midnight, he asked what all she had to do. When she mentioned spraying three laundry baskets full of shoes, he said, “I can do that.”  He came to the ballet after work and helped her. They both left at nine.

   She would take projects home with her, even after long work shifts, her mind racing with ideas. Together with her staff, they had creative license to build a costume, while always referring to a rendering. Sometimes, the costume designer is involved in the creation of the rendering; sometimes not. Campbell actualizes a vision. She determines how to best create the costume for ease of putting it on, removing it, and taking care of it. Most importantly, she explained, is the fit for each dancer, and making sure that the dancer is the focus on stage, not the costume.

   “I want the audience to see the dancer’s arms and legs performing, not the costumes,” she noted.

   In 1984, the company moved from its location in the heart of downtown Pittsburgh to its new building on Penn Avenue in the Strip District. With that move came the opportunity to house all of the company’s costumes, shoes, boots, tiaras and hairpieces, jewelry, and numerous other accessories in an upstairs storage room. Campbell said the company purchased a dry cleaning conveyor that holds more than 1,000 costumes, arranged meticulously by ballet. Each dancer, on average, wears one to seven items for each part of a performance.

   “It gets pretty serious trying to keep track of each and every one of those,” Campbell said.

   She recalls a precarious moment while working with Nicholas Petrov and the ballet “Cinderella,” when she would dress the ballerina playing the main role, help her into and out of her dress and tutu, put her tiara on, and make sure everything happened in time for the ballerina to make her stage entrance. During one of the performances, a snafu occurred while the male dancers were pulling a cord attached to the pumpkin carriage carrying Cinderella. Their reindeer heads, covered in aluminum and glitter antlers, got tangled in each other just as the pumpkin carriage was ready to go onstage.

   “The music kept playing and we frantically got their antlers pulled apart so they could get onstage. Everything went on without a beat missed and the audience never knew,” she sighed.

   This, after Campbell and her sewers stayed up all night prior to the opening performance getting all the costumes ready. As the first act got underway, a few stitchers were literally sewing costumes for the third act.

   Years later, as the company was performing the ballet “Serenade” with artistic director Patricia Wilde, the zipper on the back of dancer Tamara Rachelle’s costume broke. Campbell quickly stitched the costume behind the curtain and had it done just as Tamara went onstage. “A lot of things go on like that behind the scenes that the audience never knows,” she said.

   Campbell has had the pleasure of working with every artistic director since PBT’s inception: Nicholas Petrov, Patrick Frantz, Freddie Franklin, Patricia Wilde, and current artistic director Terrence Orr. She has been with the company longer than any other employee, having joined PBT when it was only four years young.

   She noted that Patrick Frantz was a child prodigy of music in Paris. Patricia Wilde recently was on the cover of Dance Magazine. She still sees Patrick frequently, as he currently teaches  at Point Park University during their summer intensive program. She also has lunch often with Patricia Wilde.

   While she has many fond memories, several stand out. She made Patricia Wilde’s gown for the Patricia Wilde Gala. She also designed and constructed all of Patricia’s outfits for her final week of performances as artistic director.

   In 1990, Campbell was involved in the creation of “The Mighty Casey,” a ballet created in Pittsburgh by Pittsburghers to appeal to boys. In addition to Moon Township pianist Michael Moritz composing the music, football great Lynn Swann worked with the dancers, Pittsburgh Pirates coach Tommy Sands coached  the cast, and Campbell had latitude in the creation of the costumes.

   “There will always be one corner of my heart for ‘The Mighty Casey’,” she said.

   That same year, she built all of the costumes for the new “Nutcracker.” Her staff worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, for four months, to complete everything in time for opening night.

   “I have an excellent staff, they care so much about it, just like me,” Campbell noted.

   She added that her assistant, Katie DeCaria, is a Clinton area resident, and has worked with Janet for the past eight years.

   As for the most challenging costume of her career, she remembers one in particular.

   “It was a silk striped, pieced skirt that went in a spiral that was a copy of the one Danilova wore in  Ballet Russe for the ballet ‘Gaite Parisianne,’ and I had to make it in two days!”

   The ballet bug didn’t remain just with Campbell. Her whole family got involved in one way or another. Before her two daughters entered kindergarten, they would go with their mother to the studio, allowing her to keep pace with both her creative work and motherhood.

   Daughter Katie Marie, 31, is now an aerospace engineer working in the state of Washington. Daughter Kerri Ann, 27, took dance lessons, and became a highland dancer. Both nurtured a strong love of ballet from their exposure.

   Today, Kerri Ann manages Campbell’s shop, The Dancer’s Pointe, in the Strip District.

   Campbell explained that she bought the shop when it was for sale because it made her job easier. She could purchase and stock what she needed for PBT without waiting for an order. In her occasional “spare” time, she makes things to sell at the store.

   Once her daughters were grown, she and her husband, David, took many trips to experience the ballet.

   She ticks off many memorable performances, including the Munich Opera Ballet, Australian Ballet, and Paris Opera Ballet. Janet has fond memories of attending “Swan Lake” in both King Albert Hall in London and St. Petersburg. Also, she viewed a Gershwin piece in London by the English National Ballet. Of course, she has attended many ballets by companies here in the states.

   “I had a ton of support from my family throughout my career,” she stressed. “My mother, Ann Groom, who is now 90, has been extremely helpful over the years, hand-washing many of the costumes. One year I took 18 romantic tutus home and we washed them and hung them on the clothesline; they looked happy outside,” she said.

   Most of the costumes constructed in the costume shop are hand washable, such as the Sugarplum Fairy, Snow Queen, Cavalier, Snow Prince, Odetta, Odile, and Prince Siegfried, to name a few.

   “My mother is so good at getting things white. I think the care we’ve taken in hand washing so many costumes is why they last so long,” she said.

   Over the years, Campbell has created all of the costumes for 28 ballets. When not sewing for the ballet or her store, she finds time to make her own clothes, including custom outfits she designed to wear to some of the ballets, because “everyone else knew what they were wearing except me, so I started designing my own outfits to wear.” Her favorite is one she created for “Swan Lake,” a black and white outfit featuring 22 embroidered swans.

   She also sews clothing and Halloween costumes for her two grandchildren, carrying on the tradition that she began when her own daughters were young.

   Asked what her future holds, Campbell reflected, “I never really think about what I would do in the future. When you do something as I have for so long, it becomes part of you.”

   Right now, though, she is busy getting ready for PBT’s two final ballets of the season, “3 by 3,” which opens in March, and April’s performances of “Don Quixote.”

   For “3 by 3,” Campbell and her staff are making a dozen ombre dyed unitards, all hand-painted and appliquéd.

   PBT honored Campbell with a gala dinner earlier this year to recognize her 40 years of service as their costumier. She is also proud of another honor -- being named one of the first alumni a few years back to the Wall of Fame at Cornell High School.

   She shares her love of the ballet with Cornell students through a scholarship that she and her husband present each year to graduating seniors, and by taking the Cornell band to ballet performances.

   “We just love the ballet so much,” she said.