shirt dyeing — round two!

I won’t give up on you, cot­ton shirt, no I won’t!

After fail­ing to dye this cot­ton shirt pink with beets last time, I thought of anoth­er dye­ing method I’ve been dying to try (yes, pun intended).

Sharpies! :D

I first saw this Sharpie dye­ing idea here, and then I came across anoth­er one here. I did­n’t have coloured Sharpies though, nor do I have an eye­drop­per. But I fig­ure I’ll just use my black Sharpies, and a paint­brush would do.

Aside from get­ting a slight headache from the alco­hol fume after­ward, I’m rather hap­py with the result :D

 

And the back…

 

And a close-up of the sharpie circles…

 

The white tunic was made from an extra large men’s t‑shirt. I can’t tell you how I made it though, because it’s kind of free-formed :S I cut off too much from the sides ini­tial­ly and had to sew on strips of fab­ric to each side after­wards. It’s not sym­met­ri­cal at all, but it fits!

To get rid of the Sharpie smell I put it in the wash with dark cloth­ing (and socks. We — OK, I — fig­ure they’re old socks so it would­n’t mat­ter too much, and it’s time Mike gets some new socks any­way), and it did­n’t fade! :D Just stained the white areas in a few spots on the same shirt, but it did­n’t stain the white socks that we had in the same load of laundry.

Dye­ing with Sharpies is new to me but I lat­er found out that it isn’t such a nov­el­ty, there are tons of tuto­ri­als and videos on it! Here’s a video on dye­ing a scarf with a wavy-stripe pat­tern. Very water­colour-like, which I like. Might have to try that when I get some coloured Sharpies!

On a relat­ed note, beets did­n’t quite work for me but my sis­ter-in-law com­ment­ed that red wine might work, though it would make a ridicu­lous­ly expen­sive dye. But then I thought, isn’t wine just fer­ment­ed grape juice? What about grape juice? Appar­ent­ly it works well! I found this tuto­r­i­al for t‑shirts here, and for yarn here. Will have to try that too!

Thank you for vis­it­ing and stay tuned for more exper­i­ments! Hap­py Wednes­day! :D

 

 

 

25 thoughts on “shirt dyeing — round two!

  1. This dye job looks great! I absolute­ly love cir­cle designs, and this one in s fab­u­lous. :) They look a lit­tle like styl­ized flowers!

  2. What a cool exper­i­ment! I guess there’s a tuto­r­i­al out there for every­thing, but who knew? It turned out just beau­ti­ful­ly, and no one will guess how you did it :-).

  3. Please tell how u got this beau­ti­ful result! This is the most desir­able sharpie tie dye i have seen and would love to cre­ate one…or one hun­dred. thanx for shar­ing, but give details.

  4. thank you, cheryl! i made five or six dots close togeth­er in a cir­cu­lar for­ma­tion, then drop rub­bing alco­hol direct­ly on top of the dots. the colour will spread on its own into a cir­cle. can’t take cred­it for this method though, i learned it from the tuto­ri­als i’ve linked to in the post. oth­er than that it’s juts the place­ment of the “tie-dyed” cir­cles, which is just intu­itive. let your cre­ativ­i­ty flow! hope this helps!

  5. Hi! I love this idea! I real­ly want to try it, but I was won­der­ing how you should wash it after­wards? Does the ink run?

  6. thanks kay­la! the ink did­n’t real­ly run, but fad­ed a bit after wash­ing, and my white socks that were in the same wash turned a bit pink. i did also ironed it before wash­ing to try and heat-set the colour. hope this helps!

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