Fit to be tied. (Or, I'd rather dye.)

I decided on Thursday morning to experiment a little with new folding patterns during this round of Tie Dyeing, (you can follow that link and see some shirts I did a couple years ago) and spent a couple hours online watching video tutorials. I found some that were fairly informative.

I love the internet.

Thursday night, I spent an hour and a half mixing dye in the kitchen.
I was a good, safe dye mixer, I wore my mask. See?























(You do NOT want to inhale any of the chemical stuff or dye powder. It's very bad for you. Can make your lungs bleed. Eww. Who needs that?)

Here are the dyes and some paraphernalia.
Red, Tangerine, Yellow, Yucca, Blue Green, Violet Blue and Raspberry.
















I was sort of aggravated that I didn't have any plain old blue, I had thought there was some in my supply of dye powders. Ah well, next time.

:)

I decided to fold the dry items, band or tie with string, and transport them dry instead of soaking them in the soda ash solution first and then tying them, (which is what I've always done in the past) figuring that way I could help everyone who needed a little assistance and still manage to get the myriad of projects I'd planned finished. I had seven shirts, eight pairs of socks and two pillowcases to do. I got up early so I could fold them and get our stuff packed up. We still ended up running about half an hour late.

Lyssa and I loaded the dye, all the t-shirts and socks and dresses and pillowcases and a big tub to do the soda ash soak and hmm, rubber bands, our small card table, vinyl gloves, masking tape, ziploc bags, scissors, the flat guy we're hosting for Robinella (he's going home in a tie dyed shirt) and the camera into the car and headed over to Tami's house.

For the next few hours, we hung out on the back deck and dyed. (ha ha ha ha). We made many bad jokes about that, as well as appreciating aloud the fact that we had friends worth dyeing with. Tami and Nicole and Lyssa were done long before I was. Lyssa hung out in the house, drawing pictures, and Tami and Nicole kept me company on the deck while I finished.

We arrived back home about one (because sometimes it takes awhile to dye... snort) glad we'd done it early in the day instead of waiting until it got hot.

I pondered a little about what 'they' say about tie dyeing. One of the things I've always known-but-didn't-really-know-why was that the garment or item one has dyed needs to sit in the ziploc bag for 24 hours for maximum dye retention. I know that the dyes start to break down after that time, and become less effective, and I've read that the chemical reaction of the dye with the soda ash stops at about 24 hours, too. So I've always left the stuff in bags for that amount of time.

I was curious, though. If I immediately opened and rinsed one or two of my projects, would the colors come out pastel instead of the vivid results I usually get with the fiber-reactive dyes?

So after a very brief discussion with myself, I decided to try it on a couple of my experimental projects, reasoning that if it didn't work out, it wouldn't matter much since I was learning something new. I was dyeing (oh my gosh, the jokes just keep on coming) to see how the new patterns would work.

And you know what? The colors were just as vibrant and beautiful after a couple hours as they are after the regulation 24 hours. And I learned that tying the items dry and then soaking them works very well. I will probably use that method in the future. If I dye again. Ha.

I made two like this one. One is a 3x and one is XL. They're for some friends of my mom and dad. They're a nice couple who have been wonderful friends for my parents, and I didn't mind that Mom asked me to do this. Every time my parents wear the shirts I helped Mom do last summer, this lady comments on them.

It was hard to get a really good picture of this for some reason, but you get the general idea, I'm sure.




















This is a pajama shirt. It's huge. I wore it to sleep in last night. Like the heart pattern? It's not as much lighter on the lower left of the shirt, even though it looks that way in the picture. I mean, it is lighter, but not as much as it looks like. Holding the camera sideways in a fairly dark room made the flash uneven.























Very comfortable.


This is for Tami. She knows she's getting it, so we don't have to keep it a secret.




















These are pillowcases for an online friend. We've known each other online for 12 years.









She doesn't know she's getting these. Shhh. It's our secret.

(It's okay, she doesn't read my blog.)

What do you think? Want to come over and dye?
As always, you'll get a larger picture if you click on the image.