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Step 1: Cutting and dyeing your burlap


     Before everything, you want to cut and dye your burlap. If you went with the square type burlap, cut equal length of it accordingly to how many colors you want to use. For example, if you have 20 feet of burlap, and three colors you are using, you only really want to cut three, 5-foot sections, and with the last 5 feet being the natural color burlap. You may however, want to consider dying more of your base color than anything else. For instance, if you may wish to dye 8 feet of your base color, with only 4 feet of your other colors. Now, depending on which type of suit form you want to have, you may desire to have the square type burlap, or the shredded type burlap. This is not to say that the burlap can’t be shredded before attaching it to the suit. This is the way I did it (you loose about half of your burlap if you use attach the square type strands on the suit then shreed it). Before ever attaching any of the burlap to the suit, I cut a square about 18 inches by 22 inches and started to pull out all of the 18-inch horizontal strands. This gives you a bunch of 18-inch strands, and a bunch of 22-inch strands. Keep doing it, and you got yourself a veritable feast of shredded burlap that can be attached quite readily. You way the consequences of ether shreeding the burlap before attaching it to the suit, or cutting it in squares then shreeding it, but I have had no problems with ether burlap method. Important! If the netting needs to be died because it is of a color that will stand out, you must do that now after dying the burlap and before emptying the dye buckets.

     Another thing about the burlap method. Before you go about pulling out the strands for all of the different colors, you might want to consider taking out your spray paint and adding more colors to one particular color. Haha, I know I am confusing you here, so let me break it down for you. When I was attaching the colored burlap to my last suit, I was faced with the dilemma of blending the colors that I have chosen to have (and it will be your problem as well, when you are at that part of the process) It came out kind of funny looking, so I decided to add some spray paint to the mixture to blend in the colors and little better. Then I got this crazy idea. The next time I make a suit, I will spray paint blobs of a different color onto the square burlap that I dyed. This makes it so you have more then one color on one strand. This helps considerably when blending. So, I suggest spray-painting blobs or big squiggly lines onto the big square pieces of burlap. Here is a list of suggestions for different colors.
 

Light Green Dark green or olive drab
Dark Green Light green or olive drab
Tan Green or olive drab
Light brown Dark brown or tan
Brown Light brown or dark green

(This list does not limit the different colors you can use. Spray painting different colors on to the burlap depends on what your base color is and what different colors that you are combining with the suit, which you can read about here.)

     IMPORTANT!! READ BEFORE DYEING ANY BURLAP!! Nature has something like 2 million different shades of color that it can throw out in an environment at one given time. Unfortunatly, Rit-Dye doesn't make 2 million shades of colors. Experiment. Buy some yellow and green and mix the two. Instead of letting the burlap soak up all of the dark green color, take some tan colored burlap and dunk it in the dark green dye and water for a few seconds than take it out and dry it. Do whatever you can to get the desired colors for your environment.



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