The Sisterhood of the Traveling DreamCoats

The talented artisans of Bohemia Esprit are collaborating on creating four Art To Wear coats. You can read about the travels of the four dreamcoats here: http://www.1000markets.com/blog_posts/8969

I have the great honor of working on the purple/bronze coat, and have begun by using a piece of silk that I had stuffed into my fabric closet after a I tried to speed up the heatset process and ended up burning the silk. It turns out that the burns added a bronze pattern to the dyed purple background which matches Diana's coat dye colors perfectly. I'm using the silk as a lining to the coat to make it reversible. The cut of the ingenious pattern created by Diana of DyeDianaDye allows for a simple lapel that folds back gracefully to reveal the inside lining.

I added a subtle new color to the silk, by wrapping and tying, then soaking in Dye-Na-Flow claret dye. I then hand painted accents of metallic bronze Lumiere fabric dye with a brush. After I heatset the additional dyes (this time I did it the safe and slow way!) I draped it onto the cotton coat and am pinning the edges and will hand sew the two layers with metallic thread.

Then I'll send the coat on to the next artisan, Kay of OnSlenderThreads. Magic is afoot!

Update #1 Two artists from Bohemia Esprit have now dreamed about the traveling coats and so I have taken to calling them "dreamcoats".

I've finished lining the coat with the silk and need to add embroider around the burn holes to stabilize the frayed silk edges. I've finished with all the sewing except for this final handwork, and decided to take her with me on a long train journey to Albuquerque, then sending her on to Kay (OnSlenderThreads), during my travels in New Mexico. When I mentioned that to Diana, she wrote: "I smile to think of the coat on the train with you, traveling to New Mexico. And what a joy it is to relax, and listen to the dreamcoats, as they give us their names and their needs, and fulfill ours."