I found this simple dark red skirt in the Trinity House Hospice Shop in Streatham last spring. Dark red (what was ‘burgundy’ is now called ‘oxblood’ but I’ll stick with ‘dark red’ for now) was in fashion last autumn and happily for me, it’s coming back. I believe this is one colour that flatters me, so I’m pleased to see it’s back this season. I was a bit slow off the mark last year but this year (spoiler alert!) I am planning an autumn wardrobe in which dark red features heavily.

This Country Casuals skirt is 100% Pure New Wool and as such I paid £8 for it, perhaps a little steep but the colour is perfect.

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I’ve been wanting to try another dye project since I dip-dyed a white shirt last year and it was a runaway success.

And then I saw this picture a few weeks back of my favourite fashion blogger, Atlantic-Pacific, modelling a Tory Burch dress. It’s on sale for £278 at the time of writing.

Oh yeah, and Reese Witherspon has the skirt version.

Now, when I saw that dress, my first thought was: SHIBORI. Shibori is Japanese traditional tie-dye which is traditionally done using indigo dyes. There are many techniques, including folding, binding, twisting, clamping and sewing. There are some great examples on the web if you want to read more about it. Ginger over at Ginger Makes did a Shibori class with some of the NY based sewists which you can read about here. Seeing those pictures really whetted my appetite for what might be possible. Erica over at Recycled Fashion also tried this recently and made a beautiful T-shirt. And for more on dying… Sallie Oh does some incredibly inspirational things with dye – like this one which looks a bit shibori-like. She has a great dye tutorial, with more examples, here as well.

Anyway, back to my dress. I went out looking for something to dye. The dye only affects natural fibres, and I was obviously looking for something white.

Sheets are perfect for dye projects. This double duvet cover came from the Scope shop in Lewisham (£6). It’s actually 50% cotton, 50% polyester, so it will still take the dye, but the colour won’t be as strong as it would have been with 100% cotton.

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I bought this tunic top in the Human Relief Foundation shop in New Cross, and if I remember correctly, I only paid £2 for it. It’s a stunning deep teal blue silk with gold trim, heavy embroidery and rather glamorous gold sequins! It looks like it could have been the top half of a shalwar kameez, sadly though there were no matching trousers to be had.

I wanted to turn this into something that could be worn on a glamorous evening out, so I took some inspiration from Jennifer Lawrence. Her dress is Prabal Gurung. If you’re interested, you can buy this for a mere £1,683. I  actually had a close up look at this dress when I was snooping around Harvey Nicholls a few weeks ago; the colours are gorgeous, but I’m not terribly keen on the little pocket flap things, not sure what they are for, so think I’ll leave them out… there are some other details on this dress, like the bodice darts that were sewn wrong sides together, that I left out as well for various reasons. So this is more of an ‘inspired by’ project that a full-on ‘copycat’.

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