I am considering serging it, but I'm still afraid that it'll weigh down the light layers too much - I'll have to experiment some more. (And get my serger tuned up; right now it HATES ME). I'd also have to figure out how to make it not look ugly - standard serger stitches don't really strike me as the sort of things that should show up on the outside of the garment. I'm still planning on doing each strip separately in any case... serging up and down one piece of fabric makes sense, but pleating the "blank" areas is just going to make the neckline bulky, I think.
As for stretching on the bias - I don't think the individual strips will be heavy enough to distort their shape. If I do bias-cut them, I'll let the cloak hang before doing final length adjustments.
I know Word Of God states that it should be solid charcoal gray, but I think I'm going to leave it somewhat variegated (although probably darker overall). It makes it a lot more interesting, and I think it'd blur your outline better, which I'm assuming is the secondary purpose (the first being making you look totally awesome
)
I am half tempted to try making obsidian daggers in my Copious Free Time, because it's
theoretically possible (and that's all the motivation
I need). I took an archaeology class where we spent one lab hammering at pieces of obsidian to get a feel for what the chips looked like before going off to classify a bunch of them (yeah, it was a really cool class. the labs were basically archaeology field work practice.) ...But I have to remember that it didn't work out so well. It turns out that if you hold your rock wrong, you're likely to have the chips coming off slice RIGHT THROUGH your gloves (even if you're wearing heavy leather gardening gloves) and slice right into your hand. Oops. ("And that was the first time I ever coked my keyboard with blood.")
I still have my notes from that class somewhere, though...