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.