I promised an explanation of the Nebula sari, so here we go.
I’ve been wanting to make my own fabric for a sari for a while, and the Nebula Awards seemed a perfect opportunity. NASA kindly has made its images public domain, so I was free to browse and choose one to play with.
I went with a Hubble image (link in comments) of the Trumpler 14 star cluster, in the Carina Nebula (more details below). Mostly because it was very sparkly. A nebula for the Nebulas!
You can’t just take a photo and throw it onto fabric and call it done, unfortunately. I mean, you can, but it won’t look good. What you want is to create a seamless repeat, which takes a little photo manipulation — I use Procreate on the iPad, and learned how to do this from one of the many seamless repeat tutorials on YouTube.
The second photo shows it partway through that process, where I was duplicating and shifting the image, then cropping and pasting in star clusters into the gaps. I had a lot of sharp edges, and used the Watercolor Tansy tool in Procreate to blur those. Making the seamless repeat image took me about two hours — but I’m not very experienced or skilled, and I imagine someone who knew what they were doing could’ve done it faster.
The third photo is my finished image — as you can see, it’s fairly different from the NASA original. It’s a big enough repeat that it’s not so obvious that it repeats unless you’re printing on a large piece of fabric, like the simulated blanket in the fourth image. I knew with the sari draping, that wouldn’t be an issue for me.
Then it was just a matter of ordering it. I tried two fabrics, Spoonflower’s chiffon and poly crepe de chine, both of which I like for scarves, and both $24 / yard. The chiffon draped a little better, so I went with that, but I’ll likely make scarves from the other fabric.
A typical sari is six yards, but I’m small enough, I figured I could get away with five yards — I could, but just barely, as it turned out — it was a little hard to walk in. I might add a fall in a complementary fabric at some point, to both give myself a little extra length, and take the opportunity to add some bling. If I do that, I might add a bit to the bottom hem as well.
The fabric arrived Wednesday, and the Nebulas were Saturday, and I was very busy, so I knew I didn’t want to take 3-4 hours to make a sari blouse, especially since I didn’t have any appropriate fabric on hand. (I *could* have used the poly crepe de chine, but I didn’t really want to. Most of the time, I think, you do a somewhat contrasting sari blouse.)
Instead, I went with an Indo-Western approach. A little more casual, which felt appropriate, since I wasn’t actually a nominee for an award — I was just presenting. (If I’m ever a nominee, you can probably expect me to bring the bling!)
If you’re going to do a t-shirt or tank top with a sari, I recommend getting a modal or similar stretchy fabric, and sizing it down a bit, so it clings to your body. Sari blouses are typically very tightly fitted, so they contrast with the flowing drape of the sari.
As for the sari itself, all I had to do was wash and dry the fabric, then cut off the white selvedges, iron and double-fold the hem, and sew the hem down. Which takes a while with five yards of fabric — that whole process took about an hour (not counting the washing and drying part).
Add a couple of safety pins, and a pair of leggings or underskirt, some comfy heels, and you’re ready to go!
This was really fun, I’ll probably wear it again to something (maybe making a blouse next time), and now I’m thinking about other designs that would look great on a sari…you could do a banned books sari, with titles in black on a white background, for example. That’d look cool.
(Expect to see scarves and tea towels in the shop pretty soon! Fabric available for purchase at the link in comments.)
*****
“Resembling an opulent diamond tapestry, this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows a glittering star cluster that contains a collection of some of the brightest stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy. Called Trumpler 14, it is located 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula, a huge star-formation region. Because the cluster is only 500,000 years old, it has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the entire Milky Way. (The small, dark knot left of center is a nodule of gas laced with dust, and seen in silhouette.)
Diamonds are forever, but these blue-white stars are not. They are burning their hydrogen fuel so ferociously they will explode as supernovae in just a few million years. The combination of outflowing stellar “winds” and, ultimately, supernova blast waves will carve out cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust. These fireworks will kick-start the beginning of a new generation of stars in an ongoing cycle of star birth and death.”
