project part 3

Here's the linen for the side panels of the dress in a Sappan wood dye bath. The linen mordanted for a day, the wood was also soaked for a day. The linen has been in the bath for about 20 minutes at this point. I'm going to leave it in till Sunday.

project part 2

Here is the embroidery for the collar panel of the dress, and the materials I'm using.

The original embroidery can be found here: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/asia/s/silk_embroidery_panel_with_flo.aspx

my project, part 1

Ok, so I've been reconstructing a 10th century merchants dress found on the silk road. Here is part one (no embroidery on this part...embroidery pictures are coming next). The total outfit will include these pants, hose, garters, dress, coat, head coverings, and shoes. The dress, garters, head covering, and coat will all be embroidered. It turns out I didn'thave as much material as I thought, so I'm mordanting some linen right now to dye with sappan wood, which will hopefully work out as planned! this will give me a pumpkin orange raw silk (madder dyed) and red (hopefully) dress. Both dyes are appropriate to time and place. With the embroidery, I'm dyeing most of the thread myself, and all of it is hand dyed. I'm not worrying too much about matching all the dyes to the time period, though.