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.