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.