The female tusken gown

 I realised that I had never posted about the gown that I will wear as the base layer for the female tusken.

I sewed it up in the summer, because me and my friends were planning a dye day.

It was a day when we had access to our combined large pots, an outside kitchen and a garden with both garden hoses for water and a place to hang the fabrics to dry.

I had problems finding a good dye. The fabric in the dress is raw silk and viscose, while the shawl is polyester. I also didn't want to dye them brown, just sand coloured. In the end I used a dye that was called "caramel" and it didn't really dye as dark as I wanted it to. The photo above shows the fabric for the shawl and the gown when they were still wet.

And this shows the fabrics when they were dryed. It's also very clear how different the fibres take on the dye, with the viscose taking on the most and the polyester the least. That was also why I needed to make a really strong dye bath for the shawl to darken it a bit more.

The fabric for the skirt and sleeves is a gorgeous, slubby raw silk, or silk noile. I only had a limited amount of it, that's why I made the bodice out of viscose, since that won't be visible anyway. For the tusken you can opt for short or long sleeves. For my old tusken I had rather short sleeves, but it was always hard to make sure that the arm wraps stayed up well enough to leave no gaps between the sleeves and the wraps, so this time I went for longer sleeves.