You made it this far! Time to start attaching the Burlap to the netting. This can be a long process in it self, and is certainly back breaking. I recommend you get a comfortable place to do this on, like a table or something, and sit down. Basically, all you are doing is tying the strands of burlap to the sides of the netting. It is more complicated once you start worrying about the color coordination, so I am going to make it simpler for you.

     Every ghillie suit should have what I’d like to call, a base color. This is a color that is put on first, and tied to every side of the netting. With this in mind, there are certain color combinations based on which base color you choose. Obviously, if you were going to go into an environment with a lot of greens, you would want some sort of green your base color. Likewise with brown or tan or any other color. A general rule of thumb for colors is:

     Remember, this is just a base color. Depending on what type of forest you are going to be in, you may want to choose different colors. Certainly, forest environments have the most variety of colors. Some have a think ground, full with vegetation and fallen trees and plants, and some are relatively bare with scattered grayish trees. If you know which area you are operating in, you can predict what kinds of other colors you want. A very easy way of doing this is to go into the environment you will be using this suit mostly in, and take a picture of the natural vegitation. Then pick out the most prevalent color in the photgraph, followed by the two or three other colors that you want to use, and try to match up the color as best as you can with the Rit-Dye.

     However, if your like the rest of us, and don’t really know, here are a list of color combinations depending on what type of environment you are in, what time of the year it is, and which blends are acceptable for a wide variety of environments. You basically only want to have about 2, 3, or 4 different types of color. The only color you want to avoid at all costs is black. Never, ever, dye anything black. Or for that matter, forget about what you’ve ever thought about before about the color black and its relation with the environment. Let me explain. I bet you think that if you are going to be stalking around at night that your obvious choice of color would be black; shirt, pants, cap, whatever. WRONG! You never want to be wearing black, night or day. With the exception of a totally darkened room (which in the that case, no color would matter), black stands out terribly once your eyes have adjusted to the light difference at night. This may be hard for some of you to accept, but its true. Why? To put it simply, nature has no room for the color black. The ground is brown, the grass is green, and the sky takes on a purplish tint at night. Forget 2D printed camouflage fabrics and their use of black. Those blacks are put there to mimic natural shadows, which we will already be making with the 3D ghillie suit. With that said and done, here is the list of possible color combinations for ghillie suit. But please remember, these are just suggestions based on my personal experience and knowledge. You are not limited to just these colors. Do what you want! If you want to go prancing around in a pink ghillie suit, that’s fine by me. *laugh* But on a more serious note, remember that there are over something like, 2 million different colors. Of course, Rit-Dye doesn't have that many colors, but you use what you can find, or try to match visualy.
 
 

     With that in mind, pick a base, and start attaching it to the suit. I have calculated, that you only need about 18 strands of burlap for each side of a 3 ½ inch spaced netting without getting what I like to call, a ghillie wookie. If you have less space between your netting, plug it into this formula to figure out how much maximum burlap strands you can have for each side of the netting, with X=the number of strands on each side of the netting.

And solve it like a proportion. The point of making a ghillie suit is not to look like a guy wearing a ghillie suit, a big bushed up, pile of burlap. The idea is to look like nothing. You do NOT want to overkill on the burlap. That is why only 18 strands of burlap maximum limit for each side of the netting will do. With that said, you would apply your base color to every side of the netting, with two knots of 4 strands each. This gives you 10 more strands of room to add. You may want less, depending on what you want to look like or for how much weight you would like it to be. The base color should be whatever the general area of operation is. In my educated opinion, I wanted a color that could be in almost any area in the United States, so I decided on a light green color. Your can be whatever you want it to be. When attaching other colors besides your base suit, however, you do not have to follow the 4 strand rule. You may get lazy, and start adding more then 4, or you may want to add less to blend in the environment more.

     When you have finished with the base color (you will probably have some left over, save it for later) start randomly putting other colors on. We are NOT trying to take away one pattern and replace it with another one! The idea is make the colors blend in with each other, and not have big blobs of color here and there. To get an idea of how to properly blend in the colors, take a look at regular camouflaged BDU’s. Remember, this is just an idea maker, not a guideline. Also, make sure to distribute the colors evenly as well, if you leave one particular color out of the pants when you used it all up on the jacket, the pants are going to look differently when you where them. The idea is to blend EVERYTHING together, the jacket/pants/hat are all the same in this manner. After you have attached a generous amount of burlap to jacket/pants/hat, this would be the time to do the blending. Don’t worry if the suit looks a little weird after you have attached a lot of colors and burlap to it.