Experiments with textiles

I'm no expert when it comes to working with textiles, but I'm not a expert in woodworking either... I just like to learn as much as possible about the materials I need to use to reach my goals, and right now since I'm making 1:6 scale clothes I'm trying different tings to make tings easier. One thing I find very hard is soft stretchy fabric that always seem to slide away. I was thinking what if I can find something that I can make the fabric stiff to make it easy to work with and then wash it and have it back to normal? And my first thought was to go Punk! I know punkers  use sugar water to get a hard mohawk, and it should probably work on textile as well?

      

This is my first attempt and I have no idea of what the best mixture of sugar and water is yet but for the first try I used 1.5dl boiling water and 1dl sugar ( maybe a little much ).

   

I tried different methods of drying: natural air dry, microwave and ironing.
Everyting turned out pretty much the same but if you like to iron it you have to use baking paper because the heat makes the sugar sticky.
 

The sugar water works very well so far, the otherwise very soft fabric get a more firm/stiff feel to it and makes it much easier to work with.
I hope it washes out with out a trace as well.

To be continued...