But, Are They Toxic?

I was once walking along a busy street downtown with my 2 kids, and we were wearing matching 6-colour rainbow spiral t-shirts, of my own making, of course, and I ran into a person I knew from a mothering group I had participated in a few years before. She admired the t-shirts, but then asked, "But, are they toxic?"

I saw red for just a moment ("Yes, they are toxic, but I let my own children wear them, because I'm a terrible mom and I don't care if my children wear t-shirts with toxic chemicals infused into them, and not only that, but I make them for infants and other people's children to wear because I want to make money and I don't care if the clothing poisons other people's children as well as my own!").

I'm still kind of mad about this question, although I was only asked the once. But "chemicals" get a bad rap in our world! Our bodies are made of chemicals! Plenty of stuff all around us is made of chemicals! Let's not use it as a synonym for "bad stuff!"

Rant over.

To Spin or Not to Spin -- Working with Damp Blanks

When I first started tie-dyeing, the instructions I was following at the time said to soak the blanks in soda ash, then wring them out, then fold, tie, and immediately apply the dye. The True Tie Dye DVD (which I highly recommend, btw) recommends wringing out the blanks, then folding, tying, and letting the garments completely dry before adding the dye, but only sometimes, so I'm not clear on why they sometimes work with a dry garment and sometimes a damp one.

I found that all the different approaches work well, but with different results. The less damp your garment is when you add the dye, the less the colour will travel. So when I wrung out the blanks by hand, I ended up with a much more streaky spiral, with the streaks running from the inside to the outside of the spiral design. Which is fine, but it is quite a different look from the spiral which is the result of being spun out in the washing machine. Also, I originally had a top-loading washer, but now I have a front-loader, which means that the blanks that come out of the machine now after the spin cycle have very little liquid in them, so I am able to get much clearer results in the designs as the dye doesn't travel much at all. I have never tried to dye a blank that was completely dry, but if I ever decide to do some very detailed designs that might be a way of managing it.

The Dipping Myth

It's always interesting when people ask how I do the designs; many people assume I use the older method of dropping or dipping the tied item into boiling coloured water -- and they express amazement and curiosity about how the work is done. They figure that you must cover up the parts that are not being dyed while you dip the garment in one of the colours. But while the red/pink shirt on my blog page was thrown into the remains of a pot of red dye, everything else has been made by carefully applying cold-water dyes with squeeze bottles.

The only way to get these vibrant colours, as far as I am aware, is to use Procion MX fibre-reactive dyes, which are made to react to sodium carbonate. So you soak the garment in the sodium carbonate (aka soda ash), then squeeze out excess liquid, fold and tie the garment, then you apply the dyes exactly where you want them with squeeze or squirt bottles. Then, wrap the garment in plastic (I usually use secondhand grocery bags) and leave it alone for a while, rinse, and voila!

Into The Black

I discovered a design that I like, called the Earth Shirt. There are lots of ways to do it: I chose to put the Earth on the left side of the shirt as a partial planet, and I outlined it with some crazy colours like fuchsia and yellow (not sure why, although the yellow punches the edge out somewhat) before adding the black. In the first and only attempt at this design (so far), the black has crept into the yellow -- I haven't worked out the details of making the black stay, so my use of black has been limited so far. Some people put the Earth in the front and centre of the shirt -- I prefer a less Earth-centric view of the universe, which is one reason I put the Earth on one side.

And because I'm a fan of the show Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity, I titled the shirt Into the Black. Which is another reason why I put the Earth on one side of the shirt, rather than in the centre.

In summary: the design is very easy, but the black is hard to deal with.

The First Shirts

The first few shirts I made were practice runs, of course. I did one old t-shirt without the sodium carbonate just to see what would happen, and it turned out totally pastel-coloured, although the design, the spiral, was good. I did a red one: I formed the spiral fold, applied red to the top and bottom, and washed it out. It made a red spiral design on the front and back of the shirt on a white background. I had been trying to avoid the white, but I learned that you have to force the dye down into the folds to make sure there is lots of colour.

Funny story about this one, I had washed that mostly-white shirt in cold water in the load of whites several times, and the colour was staying fast and the shirt was still mostly white with the red spiral on it. And then one day it came out of a load of wash that my husband had done, and the colour had run so that there was no longer any white showing on the shirt! I said to him, "I don't understand, how come when I washed it the colour didn't run, but when you washed it the colour spread through the shirt?" He rather embarrassedly admitted that he had added BLEACH to the load of whites! And the colour had run to other stuff in the load -- the whole load had come out slightly pink, in fact!

There was nothing really important in that load, mostly socks and underwear, a couple of towels, some t-shirts of his and my son's, which they wore with the slight pink tinge for the next couple of years. I was actually rather pleased at the effect it had on my t-shirt -- photo on this page somewhere. I still have this t-shirt even though it's pretty ratty by now; I sometimes sleep in it and I take it camping, and I sometimes tie-dye in it, too.

Adding Colours to my Palette

Well, I've been tie-dying for about 5 years now, off and on, and I've been using the same 6 colours all along -- the 3 mandatory ones, turquoise, fuchsia and yellow, plus a purple that I like some of the time, orange which is one of my favourite colours of all time, and a green that mostly leaves me unsatisfied. But I just recently added an additional "colour" to my palette, and that is white!

I'm not a trained artist, I have been learning by trial and error about colour through this tie-dying thing I'm doing. I used to say that I couldn't even draw stick people in proportion, that's how terrible I was at art. But here I am, basically middle-aged, enjoying the discussion of colour. Who'd a thunk it?

So I intentionally didn't saturate a heart tie-dyed shirt, and it has a very interesting pattern of colours on it, with lots of white patches, and I'm very pleased with it. Plus, it's already sold, to a colleague, for one of her grandchildren, so cool.