Dyeing fabric for the jedi obi and tabards

 I haven't finished the outer tunic yet, but I decided to work on the fabric for my obi and tabards.

Here you can see the white fabric that I had planned to use. I definitely felt that the white colour was too much of a contrast to the brown fabrics. I first decided to just tone it down with a tea bath.

This was the result after a quite concentrated tea/coffe bath. One shouldn't expect more than a different in shade when using tea/coffee. Worse though was that there must have been some red dye residue in my big pot, becase even if you can't see it clearly here, there was a lot of pinkish splotches on the fabric. I also started to feel that even the toned down colour was still too much of a contrast to the browns. Looking at many of the jedi in the films, most of them keep to just one base colour, I really wanted to get a more brown fabric.

I went to the paint store that also carries limited supplies of dye. The problem was there was only a brand that should be used in the washing machine, and they only had one brown option. Well I went for the brown option and decided that I could probably go ahead and dye on the stove top, or rather in my big plastic vat in the bathroom that I've used before.

Now at least the fabric got brown, and not dirty white. It was obvious that the fabric that I thought was a cotton was a blend of cotton with some synthethic fibre that didn't take the dye at all. Still the cotton fibres took enough dye that the base fabric turned very lightbrown. An unexpected effect was that fibres in the pattern took the dye very differently, so the geometric pattern went from almost invisible to very clear. This means that I will not have to embroider the pattern to make it stand out.

I got some bad splotches, apparently the dye hadn't quite dissolved when I put the fabric into the dye bath. It's a lot less thant he pink splotches that were there before the brown dye, and I will be able to work around that part of the fabric and still get enough of fabric left for the obi and tabards.

Here is the fabric just draped over the dressform with the inner and outer tunic. The gemoetric pattern actually have the same colour as the inner tunic so now I feel that all the colours and fabrics blend in a lot better. I think I'm going to call this my chocolate-caramel jedi.