Tie Dye with the Boy Scouts

We helped a local troup make shirts for camp – they needed to match for patrols and thought tie dye would be good.  What follows are a few of the shirts they made that day….

Coming up soon, a sewing project and some tie dye for us!

Tie Dye – Session 3

Like I said before – lots of tie dye in the last few weeks.  This is the last chunk of photos from my camera, so it should tide everyone over for awhile.

I wish I had taken a shot of the back of this-you can see a bit through the collar.  There are multiple stripes down the back.

I found this white jacket in my “ready to dye” bin, but it doesn’t fit anyone at our house anymore.  I dyed it up and gave to the bubbly little gal down the street, who just LOVED it!  Yay!  I learned that the fluffy stuff inside, and all the thread is in polyester and doesn’t dye at all.  Note to self:  Check labels when buying.

This is the most comfortable skirt – ever – on me!  The side has a waterfall effect that is very artistic, and it is super light from a baby weight jersey. A bit clingy, but any heavier and it wouldn’t drape as nicely.

And the end result:

Tie Dye – Session 2

The following pictures were taken when J, another of S’s friends, came over to dye.  J had a friend having a baby in the hospital at the same time he was over, so it was fitting that many onesies were adorned in this session.

Tie Dye – Session 1

S has had a large amount of time off from work due to mandatory shutdown of his plant.  During that time, multiple tie dye sessions have occurred with different friends present – call it our community outreach on tie dye. Below is one sessions worth of work as documented by the Glitter Glue Princess, most by a coworker of S’s.

A saga of some wrap pants.

Last weekend, we did lots of tie dying – many pics to come later.  But…  This post is a saga.  About wrap pants.  Just follow me for a bit…

I got this crazy notion that I needed some light airy pants to wear to the folk music festivals this summer.  Also, they would be great for lounging around the house, after a long hot day at the bakery.  So, I bought this pair from Dharma Trading. They were beautiful, and fit well when they arrived.

After washing and dying however, they were a bit, um, what is a nice term, scant of fabric on the sides.  I was showing more thigh than I cared to.

Fortunately, they fit the Glitter Glue Princess perfectly!  Admittedly they are a hair long, but they give her full coverage, which is great.  She just likes to fiddle with the ties too much, which is annoying.

I took the pair that didn’t fit and drafted a pattern with an additional 4″ on the side that ties.  The nice thing about the pattern is that there is only one real seam in the pants – the crotch seam.  Aside from hemming, there really isn’t much to making a pair of these.  Winging it a bit and building my own pair, I shortened them to capri length, and came up with this:

They don’t look like much here, but once washed and dried, they look like this:

Forgive the weird slanty thing going on- the tie wasn’t fully tied in the back, so I was pulling on them, which caused the weird tug thing going on.

I like how they dyed up.  I just ordered another 6 yards of rayon challis to make more….

A solution to my “where’s my girl?” dilemma

Trying to find my daughter last year at the girls on the run final event was like trying to find waldo when every looked the same – just take a look at this shot from last year.  Can you find the Glitter Glue Princess?  I honestly couldn’t either, after I looked at the shot at home.  They looked like an undulating sea of people, and I just wanted to find my girl….

I came up with a solution to this dilemma – headbands!  I was originally going to make one for Glitter Glue Princess, but decided to make them for her whole team (so I could find the rest of them too!).

We picked the bright green of this years shirt and added the school color of blue, and resulted in the following.

Fresh out of the rinse bucket:

Rinsed, washed, and modeled:

Now….  They will be much easier to find…..

It’s coming…..

Tie dye season is rapidly approaching.  Yay!!!!!  Time to drag the buckets out to the yard again!

Dying to do more…

After my first round of success with the new techniques, I tried my hand at a few more shirts/fabric…

This was an attempt to make tire tracks on the shirt, but it just comes off as a band – not awful, but not what I wanted – I have to rethink the methodology here:

Next up, I bought some rayon to sew into a few things and test this method on.  Yay for hippie skirts!

Old Dog – New Tricks

So, I’ve picked up a few new tiedye techniques that I’ve been toying around with. The first was soaking the shirts in soda ash and allowing them to dry overnight. More time to process, yes, but definitely changes HOW the dye is taken in by the fabric. I’m not too concerned about degradation of the fabric due to this – I’ve got some shirts from seven years ago that I used the same technique on when making mandalas. The second is variations in accordian pleating and how the dye is applied to accordian pleating. I’m looking at making different color patterns on either side of the pleat to determine the result.

I finished these, and thought I’d share…. What do you folks think of this technique?

You can see the pleating method best here and note the differences on application. I think this one has the best visual as the woven takes on the dye more readily than the knit – many more discreet additions of liquid can be seen here. Glitter Glue Princess is thinking about using this piece to make the outside of her messenger bag for school.

Roar – don’t mess with a soccer team in tiedye

One of S.’s friends has an industrial embroidery/screenprinting business (drool, drool).  They asked us to work with them on tiedye designs for use on soccer shirts, possibly doing en masse once school gets back in for the highschool.  The colors are orange and black, two colors that don’t play nice together.  Here are the designs they came up with…  Forgive the windswept look – it was quite a blustery day.

This one is my personal favorite even though the pic is really crummy.

If I were an opposing team, I think I’d run and hide if I saw any of these coming at me.