…the start of a 12th century printed silk tunic project :)

Wooohooo! I finally started the 12th century printed silk tunic project for my sweetheart!
And you find me quite excited as I was preparing for this very special project for some time now.

You might have already been wondering about all the new 12th/13th century inspired block printing stamps which I created during the last months. After finishing the last stamp we were finally able to put the new block printing stamps to good use. 

…and as you can see on the picture underneath, we printed some lovely yellow raw silk fabric:

We purchased this beautiful yellow raw silk about 2 years ago at our favorite SCA event – Gulf Wars in Lumberton, Mississippi – from 96th district, a really great fabric merchant. And now, nearly 2 years later, I finally found a good use for it.

…and I have to admit that working with my husband was actually much more fun than we probably both anticipated. *lol*

Yeah, who knows me, knows that I can be quite stubborn when it comes to my projects. Nevertheless I decided to give my husband some creative freedom concerning the printing pattern. Well, I use the word “some” as I actually rejected his very first ideas about just printing along the bottom edge of the tunic. Yeah, I wanted to print all the fabric from the very beginning true to the slogan ‘go big or go home’! Why only printed along the border? I wanted to go big and print it ALL as I worked far too hard on cutting this stamps to only do a little bit of printing… 😉

And now, that we printed it all, I am very pleased with the result! The print looks very great. Especially when you consider that I just quite recently took up block printing and stamp carving. I am still learning a lot with every new printing and carving project.  

We used flat black wall paint from ‘Home Depot’ – a hardware store chain here in Kentucky – for the printing. Purchasing the paint in small sample jars makes it possible to get good quality paint in nearly any color ones heart desires for little money. I even thought about using some of the black printing ink I have instead. However, I knew from the beginning that I would need far more ink for this project than I had in my little ink tube. Especially when consider that what you can see on the pictures above is just 50% of the fabric we printed – we mirrored the whole pattern on the back. 

Apropos raw yellow silk fabric – I really didn’t have much of this fabric to begin with as I found it at the leftover table from 96th district at Gulf Wars. Yeah, I admit it, I am quite guilty of rescuing lonely fabric and yarn from time to time. I treat this pieces as a personal challenge to myself and try to make the best of the little I have. Therefore I was quite nervous at the beginning of this project when I started cutting. I wasn’t really sure if I actually had enough fabric for the whole tunic project. And I was very happy to find enough fabric left at the end – after cutting the body part and the gores – to cut full sleeves for my husbands new tunic:

…and tonight I am already working at attaching the last gores to the body part with proper medieval seams:

I hope to finish the major seams soon so I can actually turn the fabric around and put it on my husband in order to take some pictures for you and to start fine tuning of the 12th century side slit neckline my husband likes so much. I even might have a drawing of the basic tunic pattern which I use for my husband somewhere – I just need to find it again… 🙂