Tutorial Tuesday-An Experiment

I've had this tutorial on my computer for a few weeks now and I've debated about posting it or not. I really like the idea but I'm not thrilled with how the final result came out. It's more of a color issue in my head then an issue with the technique. I would have preferred brighter colors in the end. But this was my first one and to be honest a real test. I wasn't even sure if it would work or not.

Let me run down what my thought was behind this technique before we get started. I had the thought that it would be neat if we could use the decor elements (DE) on shirts (or whatever clothing or fabic item). Some of the baby DE on onesizes was my real hope. But I didn't want to buy the DE and have it not work. So last time I put in an order I got the hostess flower. Then I got a really inexpensive t-shirt from Wal-Mart. And a couple of fabric dies. The way I planned on doing this was put the DE on the shirt and then use a water bottle to spritz the color over the DE. Then when it dries, pull off the DE and you'd have your image. And it did work----kind of. We'll get started on the tutorial and I'll let you know tips that might help you if you decide to do anything like this.

To prep my shirt, I washed it, and put a piece of cardboard in it so that the color wouldn't bleed through.

Put your DE on your shirt (or whatever your dying). You have to work a little harder to get it to stick to fabric then you do when your putting it on a wall or other hard surface. It doesn't look like it's sticking at first, but it will. It helped me to use my bone folder, instead of the DE tool. Also when you're slowly peeling back the backing use the bone folder to hold down the image on the shirt. Once it's all on there make sure your rub it with your fingers to make sure everything is laying flat. You don't want the die to go under the DE.

Mix your dies, I'm using orange and what's supposed to be green but looks more black in the picture, and in person. So because it looked so dark I was a little worried about putting it on the shirt, where I planned. I had thought I would do the flower orange and the leaf green. But when I saw how dark it was, my plans changed.

So as you can see, I did the whole flower in orange and just spritz the 'green' in spot. I didn't want the shirt completely covered in die, I just wanted more of a spritz look. I'm not sure if it was my waterbottles or the die but it would spray normally, I think it kept getting clogged, with some dye that might not have been completely disolved.

I sprayed this outside, brought it inside and let it dry. I let it dry for a long time, maybe like 2 days. Not that you necessarily have to wait that long, I just didn't have time to get back to it before then. Once it's completely dry, take the DE off. They come off really easy too.

Now here's where I got disappointed.....

According to the directions on the die package, after it's dry you're supposed to rinse it in warm-cool water until it run clear. I knew the color would fade a little but I had no idea how much it was going to fade. But as I was rinsing the shirt, the color bleed onto the front back, pretty much where I didn't want it to go, so in person it's kind of tye-dyed. But when your rinsing it there's really no way to prevent that from happening and I didn't even think that that would happen when I had this thought in my head. So I think this technique would work great if you were to stick with one color and dye the whole item that one color. I may try it again, especially with some baby onesis, and dye the whole thing one color. But here's what the shirt looked like when it was done.

It's not horrible, it's certainly wearable. But I was just very unhappy that it faded so much when I rinsed it. The green never ended up looking greenish, it was more of a not quite navy color.

But all in all the technique worked pretty good. Good enough for me to want to try it again. So the experiment was a success-technique wise, just not the final project I envisioned. But that's ok, that's what experiments are about, right?

So if you try this technique I'd love to see what you do, send me a picture through email or post a comment on this tutorial, I'd love to see it!

Thanks for looking, see you tomorrow!