BST.

Last week we handed in our Blood, sweat and tears work. This was a project in which we were given a poem Aunt fanny: the legend of a shirt by Thomas Ingoldsby (8pages bloody long). This is the story of a shirt and is set from 1802 to 1832. I tells the story of a young boys aunt who sets out to make him a shirt, throughout the story different things happen and it takes over 20years to get the shirt finished, in the end the shirt is hung over a chair in front of the fire to dry but ends up setting on fire as does the rest of the kitchen. We were to choose a stage of the shirt and create the shirt how we imagined it to be. This included plenty of historical research as the shirt had to be properly made. Along with lots of pattern cutting, machine and hand stitching and dyeing.
I chose to create my shirt right at the very end of the story , which mean the shirt was pretty much burnt to a crisp. This might sound easy right ? all i had to do was create this shirt and set it on fire. NO! the fabric i used pretty much melted as it was not 100% cotton. PROBLEM. I ended up testing out endless different brown and black dyes to get the right one. Testing out tea and coffee to stain the shirt. Burn tests etc etc etc. In the end i soaked it in tea. Added black and brown dye (which may i add took a while because i had to get it in the right places without it seeping into other parts of the shirt) to the pieces i wanted it to be on. I then ended up using in scent sticks to burn the shirt which took a while because they were so small and burnt slowly. So in the end i just burnt the shirt, panicked a little bit when it set on fire but hey. So here is a picture of my final shirt. Not very good quality because i took it on my phone but i will get a better one on when i get my shirt back!