Freshly dyed tunic

Hey this is pretty good for me... yesterday I promised to post photos of the dyed tunic fabric - and here it is :o)

I dyed it with Red Lac. The felt is merino, with tussah silk fibre, BFL curly locks and a very bumpy yarn that my daughter Rachael spun last summer (10 years old). The idea being that all the different fibres would take up the dye differently and it would give a variegated effect. It certainly did that! I think I might of taken it off the stove & rinsed it a little too quickly; the lovely deep mulled wine coloured dye had gone clear, and the felt was now that colour... but when I rinsed it loads of colour came out. Its very mottled and variegated - which is the look I wanted. It goes from quite a dark rich red to a nice pinky red. Some of the locks are very vivid & the silk looks gorgeous. Its quite hard to get a good representation of the colour.

The colours show best on this photo

The spiral is on the back. For the front I laid out the left half bringing the fibres about 10cm past the mid line, put a piece of bubblewrap over the whole left side and then laid out the right, again extending the fibre 10cm past the midline, this gave me the front opening. Ive cut along the top of that opening & extended it a little each way for the neck hole.

All pinned together

It fits pretty well sitting just on the hip. Tomorow Im going to felt a hood, dye it to match & sew it on :o)

This is a pretty big learning curve for me; its my first tunic (Ive got allsorts of plans for jackets, coats, skirts etc :o) and Im certainly a novice when it comes to dyeing. Next time I will make the felt longer; it shrunk some more while I was dyeing it. I should of guessed really, I did boil & stew it for about 2 hours with the mordanting & dyeing!

Having a tailors dummy or being double jointed would be useful too! Its not so easy trying to pin & fit something on your own body!