Still unsure how to finish the edges of the mistcloak strips. Cutting on the bias doesn't actually help much; when it does fray, it looks really ugly. I wonder if edge-stitching + cutting on the bias would be helpful?

Anyway, I've been experimenting with different combinations of strip width and weights of fabric. For your perusal:

Front layers still 2", back layer 1"

Only front layers; those 1"


Definitely on the right track here. It's getting much more airflow through, so it's fluttering nicely.


Back layer only (1")


All layers; 1"

Front at .5" (more or less), back 1"

Not a fan of this one. The thinner strips just look tattered, it's impossible to cut strips that narrow straight, and they're so narrow that any edge finish would practically take up the entire strip.


So, I think I'm going with all layers, 1" all around. After seeing a cloak on the TWG forums made entirely of organza, I think I'll be set if I put a partial layer of organza on top to give it some liveliness (? I lack the fancy artsy fashion designer terminology. Something something "dynamic", maybe). Updates will be forthcoming.

It should also have a hood; I'm contemplating making it out of a solid piece of the heavy charmeuse. I don't think I want to sew strips into a hood. Ugh.


So anyway, I'm making another partial mockup with the rest of my fabric, all 1" strips. Unfortunately, quilting it down - even just hand-basting - is approximately impossible unless you've stabilized it into submission first. Lacking stabilizers, I've been just hand-tacking each layer together. (I really need to get some stabilizer.)

I forgot how much I hate working with satins. Even with a rotary cutter, this stuff was !$!@$ impossible to cut straight.


I ended up deciding to tear it, at least for the purposes of this experiment.


Unfortunately, tearing is a little rough on the lightest-weight silk.


Anyway, here's one of the piles of streamers. I think this is the lightest-weight fabric.

And here's the heavy charmeuse.


The edges got a little stretched when I tore the fabric, so I'm ironing all the pieces flat again.



My (probably futile) attempt to keep them from getting all wrinkled in my backpack.


The base layer - 2" strips of the heavy charmeuse sewn together at the top.


Pinning on another layer.


Two layers.


I lightly stitched the back layer together for about 6", because it was impossible to handle this piece otherwise.


And then I tacked the front two layers together down to about six inches as well.


Here's the whole thing laid out.


Not a great picture, but you get the idea.


If this were the finished product, it'd be at least six inches longer. I don't think that would affect the drape all that much, though.






My wonderful housemate Kevin waving it around so I could capture how it moved. My dog is looking on in the background with his trademarked "I do not understand why you humans do what you do" expression.

Sigh. In the end, the light outer layers were just not as tendril-like as I wanted. Now that I've got this documented, I'll slit all the strips up the middle and see what 1" strips look like. (The fabric will also be darker overall, and about six inches longer.) This was somewhat disappointing, but better now than later.

FINISH HIM!!!

*cough* Sorry, I always wanted to say that in an appropriately fruity voice. Although possibly it should be "Finish hem!"

I am not terribly pleased with the results of my experimental edge finishes. Even using #100 silk thread (i.e., super fine), all the sturdy ones ended up far too stiff.

Various satin stitches.

Rolled hem.




I'm contemplating just doing a double row of very small straight stitches down the edge. I'm not sure if this actually wins me anything, though.



The edge would look like this, probably.

Maybe that, in combination with fray-check or fabric medium, would do something useful. I don't know. Well, tomorrow hopefully I'll start cutting up the fabric, and I can see how badly the edges fray if I leave them alone (*twitch* *twitch* nothing goes out of my workshop with unfinished raw edges... unless I don't have a choice. Grumble.)

No I do NOT mean lancet.

Here begins round 1 of mistcloak fabric experimentation!

I used Lanaset (and man, did google's auto-correction irritate me here) acid dye on silk: a 19mm charmeuse, a 12mm satin, and an 8mm flat crepe. I normally use Procion reactive dyes, which can actually be used on protein fibers as well (prepare your fiber in an acid soak rather than a basic soak, and heat-set it), but the problem is that the Procion color card is calibrated for dyeing on cotton; it's reasonably accurate for most plant fibers, but the colors can be wildly off on protein fiber. So I ended up with Lanaset, which is an acid dye (this is much less scary than it sounds. It just means that you pre-soak with vinegar).
First off, preparing different strengths of dye solution:

Here's my bottle of 2% stock solution.


For hand-application of dye to fiber and fabric, usually you lay it all out on a sheet of plastic and wrap it up when you're done, in preparation for steaming or batching (if your dye doesn't need heat, you just give it time to react). Yes, this is my dining room. And yes, my housemates are wonderful.


I thought I'd try spraying on some dye to see what it looked like.

And also put some in cups for brush-painting.

Hrm. The sprayed-on look is... not really what I was going for.

Anyway, this is the 8mm crepe after I've done various things to it - spraying in the far corner, a few different shades of hand applied dye on the rest.

My first shot at hand-applying the dye.


This is the 12mm silk, painted with dye and ready to be rolled up.

At this point I ran out of time and had to go to work, so I rolled them all up and stuffed them in the dye pot until the next day.

Acid dyes generally require two things to fix them to the fiber: acid (unsurprisingly), and heat. Lanaset dye can just be steamed (although if you're immersion-dyeing, you can just heat the whole dyebath). Unfortunately, although I found this lovely pot at Goodwill, the metal colander thing I got to go inside it for the fabric to sit on wouldn't quite fit. Improvisation time!

All wrapped up and starting to get steamy.


You're supposed to wait for it to all cool down to room temperature before rinsing it out. Ahahahaha yeah right.


The really cool thing about Lanaset is that the dyebath exhausts. This means that all of the dye reacts with the fabric, so when you rinse it out, all that should be coming off is some slightly vinegar-y water. Unlike my Procion-dyed bamboo yarn, this did not need EIGHT RINSES. (grr...)


Here's the 19mm charmeuse rinsed off.


Trying to fit all of them onto this drying rack in a way that would allow all of them to dry took some ingenuity. And clothespins.

And now for the moment of truth! (Note: none of this fabric is as blindingly shiny as it seems; the flash on the camera just brings it out. Due to that, it's also a couple shades darker than it looks in photographs.)

8mm crepe:

You can see a little bit of experimentation with the squirt bottles in the middle. I had mostly given up on that technique by then, though.


This stuff is super super light and fine. I hope it does the "curling like the mists" thing; I'm planning on having it as the top layer.


A nice all-over mottled pattern. Not bad.

12mm satin:
This one I did only with foam brushes, and I actually managed to divide up the fabric and remember what I did where instead of just sort of slapping things on to see what happened.

You can see the dividing line right down the middle there...


Closeup of the darkest section.


This is the lightest section...



...and this is the medium-colored section.

19mm charmeuse:
Features of note:

Remember how I said I let it sit wrapped up in plastic overnight? I think some of the patterning here is from being crumpled in the plastic. I'm starting to see the point of the Maiwa Handprint instructions for dyeing with Lanaset - namely, to apply your dye and then let the fabric dry completely before steaming it. At least that way you know your dye isn't going to seep around before you set it. On the other hand, you don't come up with cool things like this by accident.


A heavier application of spray. The lighter areas are from being crumpled in plastic as well.


The entire spray corner, with patches in two different intensities.

The backside of the softer sprayed area - it's hard to see the pattern when the camera flash is making the fabric super shiny. The back side of this fabric is matte, though, so it's easier to see.

The front side of the softer sprayed area. I can't remember exactly, but I think this area involved painting over the spray with a layer of the most dilute dye, and shaving cream. (Yeah, apparently if you spray some shaving cream on top of the dye, you can smoosh it around and soften the edges a bit.) I rather like this effect.

But... where do the tassels go?

All right. If you've read Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series (You haven't? Go fix that. Right now.), you will understand why I need to make a mistcloak. See, in the Mistborn universe there's, well, a lot of mist. Particularly awesome allomancers get to wear mistcloaks (useful, since they tend to run around at night in the mist a lot). Here's the description:

He pulled open the pack, then whipped out a dark gray cloak. Large and enveloping, the cloak wasn't constructed from a single piece of cloth--rather, it was made up of hundreds of long, ribbonlike strips. They were sewn together at across the chest, but mostly they hung separate from one another, like overlapping streamers.
Kelsier threw on the garment, its strips of cloth twisting and curling, almost like the mists themselves.
Dockson exhaled softly. "I've never been so close to someone wearing one of those." "What is it?" Vin asked, her quiet voice almost haunting in the night mists.
"A Mistborn cloak," Dockson said. "They all wear the things--it's kind of like a...sign of membership in their club."
"It's colored and constructed to hide you in the mist," Kelsier said. "And it warns city guards and other Mistborn not to bother you." He spun, letting the cloak flare dramatically. "I think it suits me."

From elsewhere:
Vin followed, her cloak tassels spraying rainwater.
So you see why as soon as I read this I had to make one. I'm always up for some sewing challenges. Read the rest of my blog and you'll see. (Also, I'm a hopeless fangirl. Some people write fanfic. Some people draw fan art. I... cosplay. Sigh. One of these days I'll get moving on that Lulu (FFX) costume - involving, as it will, far too much springsteel.)

I think my general plan of attack will be to dye silk in various shades of gray and/or mottled gray (I <3 Dharma Trading), cut it up, and quilt it down in a diamond pattern. I'm going with a diamond pattern because the pattern will naturally get looser the farther down it goes, so that the fabric doesn't all break free at a single cutoff point. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to go with different widths of strips in the cloak, but I'm definitely going to layer them a bit.

And, just because it's too cool an idea to pass up, I'm going to (attempt to...) carve a couple of the allomantic symbols (see this for a relatively un-spoileriffic example) in wax and cast them as cloak clasps. This, of course, is probably out-of-genre (at least, since the two symbols I'm using are atium and [redacted for plot reasons]), but it's just too cool not to do. (I'm finally taking a Real Metals Class at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts this fall, which ought to help. I've done a bit of lost-wax casting before (really need to write the post for that...), but it's not the same.)

The challenges I'm expecting are:

• I have no clue how to finish the edges of the strips. This fabric will all fray, which I don't think is going to leave me with the look I want. I'm afraid that a rolled hem or satin-stitched hem is going to be too bulky and interfere with how the fabric flows. Using fray-check (or maybe fabric medium?) might work, but it tends to wick through the fabric, and fray-check, at least, dries stiff. I could maybe counteract the wicking by thickening with alginate (would that even work? no clue!), but I'm dubious.
• I'm buying a yard of each weight of fabric for the sole purpose of trying out a million different dyeing techiques and cutting it up and sewing it down and tinkering until I've figured out how to get it to flow right. A lot is going to be riding on the construction details.
• Where the hell do the tassels go??? They'd weigh the bottom down too much for it to flow right (unless maybe they were on the very bottom layer), but aside from that I have no guesses.

I will chronicle my first ever attempt to use acid dye shortly.

Step 6: Don't be annoying. Kikyo is not annoying at all.

While doing research for this costume, I came across a kind of hilarious guide on how to act like Kikyo from Inuyasha. It boiled down to "Dress like Kikyo. Learn archery. Don't be a twit."

Anyway. I wanted to dress as a miko (Japanese Shinto shrine maiden) for a party. This party was on a Saturday. The fabric got to my house on the evening of the Wednesday before that. So, uh, guess what I did all of Thursday, when I was off work. That's right...

Part 1: Hakama
Hakama are the giant poofy pleated pants. For miko, they're always always Bright Red. I based these (very) loosely off the Lastwear pattern, which makes slightly odd but really cool-looking hakama ... it wasn't intended to be as loosely based as that, but then I ran out of time, and had to compensate for mistakes, and, well.

So. First off, I didn't get nearly enough fabric. At least, not to follow the pattern as written. I thought that 2.5 yards would be more than enough for any reasonable pair of pants. Unfortunately, hakama are not reasonable pants. So I spent the better part of an hour juggling numbers to figure out just now I could salvage this.
Eventually I managed to trim off just enough out of the pleats to be able to fit the front and back of one leg across the width of the fabric (yes, each leg is 58" around...). Whew.

Then the part I was dreading... trying to get all the pleats in accordance with the pattern. It took several tries to get the numbers to match with reality, but eventually I got it...



If you zoom in, you may notice my toes that I was marking the fabric with something, er, more indelible than regular fabric marker or chalk. Thankfully, I came to my senses when doing the other leg and did it in pencil. This was a lifesaver, because I then proceeded to cut out two left legs. Doh. It's a good thing for me that the wrong side of this twill looks almost like the right side, or I would have been Very Very Sad.

Finally, I got all of the right marks onto the correct sides of the correct pieces of fabric (although I think I did mix up a front leg with a back leg somewhere - they're almost identical, though, so it didn't really matter). Then the other part I was dreading rolled around, which is to say, actually getting the pleats physically in place. I don't know what it is with me and pleats. I can do pleats on the fly, but when I try to do pleats matching up to a pattern, I just fail horribly. See:

One of those things... is not the same width as the other. Sigh.

Eventually, I realized that following the pattern after making such substantial modifications to it was just going to be a pain. I also realized that the original pattern appears to have been made to fit someone with a Much Larger waist than mine, and since I took the extra width out of the inside of the pleats, my hakama perforce would fall right off. This is where I hit the part of the project where I just start totally making sh*t up. There's one of those in every project, but most of them don't come quite so early.

So, after recalculating to make sure the final width would be, you know, reasonable, I just put the pleats in where they wanted to go. It turned out that my pleats were just as deep as the original pattern called for... so it may have been a win that I didn't get enough fabric. If I had followed the original pattern, it would have been terrible.

There, doesn't that look better?

Next up was the whole waistband unit. I more or less did this by the pattern, although I left off a lot of the quilting, due to time constraints. (I have discovered a secret fondness for topstitching and quilting things down. If you do it neatly, it just looks so gorgeous!) Here's part of it:


This is about where I stopped taking pictures, because the time pressure was getting to me. A couple more highlights from the remainder of the evening:

• I ended up having enough fabric. Barely. Part of the back waistband was patched together from the crotch cutouts.
• And I had to make the back pleats deeper because I only had enough fabric to make the back waistband so wide. Eep.
• If you're curious, I ended up stiffening the koshita with a couple layers of upholstery velvet.

Anyway, eleven hours after I started, I achieved VICTORY!!

The first picture was better, but I had to include this one just for the expression on my face. Can't you just see me doing the FF Victory Dance here?

That's about it for the hakama. They got pleated and pressed, of course.

Part 2: Kimono Top
This was actually fairly uneventful. (Gasp!) Basic kimono patterns are really fairly simple. Although, once again, I ended up not getting enough fabric to have a comfortable surplus... sigh. Well, mostly because I forgot how deep the slits in the side of the hakama were going to be, and I sadly didn't have enough fabric for the kimono to go down long enough all the way around to cover it. (I ended up piecing something together to make the kimono longer just where the hakama vents were).

Part 3: Hair Tie
This was something of a last-minute inspiration. One possible mode of miko hair style is to have a ponytail wrapped in prayer paper and tied with something that looked like twine in the pictures I saw, but probably isn't. I had a scrap of white fabric left, and some red ribbon, so I just finished the edges of the fabric, sewed the ribbon on, and voila!
The tie isn't quite right, of course, but it's all red and white, which makes it plausible enough.

Here are pictures of the whole thing (this is from after I got back from the party, so I was tired and grumpy. This costume looks much better in real life, especially when freshly pressed. Also, you can't see the perfect perfect shoes and tabi socks I found in Chinatown and borrowed from a friend, respectively.)

Just flowers then. And the shine off the back of a dragonfly. I wanted a piece of the moon, but blue-dragonfly-shine was as close as I could get.

Or, Adventures With Silk Paper.

So, the theory behind silk (well, I used bamboo fiber that I dyed, but the principle is the same) paper is that you sandwich some fiber between netting, wet it, squish fabric medium through it, and let it dry. (There are various other things you can use to stick it together, depending on the specific properties you want out of it, but fabric medium works as well as anything else.) Anyway, here's the process:

Take your fiber and start laying it out on the netting (you should also put plastic underneath so that you don't get fabric medium everywhere). For extra strength, do multiple layers with the grain at right angles to adjacent layers.

The fiber I dyed wasn't particularly smooth, so it was hard to just pull out nice even tufts. I ended up taking smaller segments and spreading them apart. It ended up getting me rather uneven paper, but it has an interesting texture.

All done with that step.

Now fold over the netting, or lay another piece on top, or whatever you need to do to get both sides covered.


Now you need to wet out the fiber to make it easier for the fabric medium to work all the way through. Get your soapy water ready (something like 1t/cup works fairly well).


Start working it through the fiber. The fiber has to be completely saturated; it takes more water than you think.

Next, peel back your top layer of netting and sort of brush the loose fibers back toward the center to make a "selvedge"; it makes it much easier to get out of the netting later.

Ready for fabric medium.

At first I was brushing it on, but eventually I decided to just dump it on. (This was fairly heavy paper, so it took a lot.)

Squish it in with your hands if you like!

Yeah, there will be suds; you just soaked the whole thing in soapy water, it'll do that.

Then hang it up to dry (ok, it would probably be better for the fiber to not hang it in direct sunlight, but I felt like living dangerously.)

Ironing to heat-set the fabric medium. Check the label on whatever sort of glue stuff you're using to see if you need to do this.

And there it is! This was three fairly heavy layers of fiber, and it came out more like a felt than anything else.



After that, I decided to try experimenting with making the lightest possible paper I could. This is what I ended up with! It's surprisingly sturdy. I could see using it in place of organza for some projects.



You can't see the shimmer very well in this photo :(