Bleaching, Dyeing, Painting, and Having Pun With T-Shirts

Having grown up in the 1970s, my initial tie-dye experience was of the overdiluted-dye, dip-and-hold, wash-with-vinegar Scout camp experience that resulted in faded pastel t-shirts and bandanas. While brushed denims, fades, and prints were becoming popular (and available), teens such as we spent our weekends beading and embroidering our own jeans, sizing them by wearing them in hot-water baths, and fading them by washing them in the bathtub with bleach (replicating the tie-dye effect in reverse).

Folding, banding, and bleaching t-shirts can remove or re-color certain dyes to create graphic effects similar to tie-dyeing. Putting bleach into a spray bottle can add "star field" and "galaxy" night-sky effects to blue t-shirts. And pre-painting with bleach can lighten specific areas of a shirt to make way for more subtle colors without needing multiple stiff, likely-to-crack-even-with-fabric-medium layers of craft paint.

Tips for Reverse-Dyeing With Bleach

• Bleaching only works on plant fibers and (some) synthetics
• Bleach will dissolve animal fibers, so keep it far away from wools and silks
• Work in a well-ventilated area
• You do not want to be overcome by bleach fumes
• Wear disposable gloves to protect your hands
• If using a sprayer or a paintbrush, wash it out with soapy water immediately after finishing your bleach work to avoid rusting the spray pump or destroying the hairs of the paintbrush
• Test a small, "invisible" area first

• Not all colors wll bleach; not all will bleach to white
• Many red are either permanent (will not bleach out), or will only bleach slightly
• Some navy dyes bleach to a reddish tan
• Let the bleach "develop" — some fabrics and colors won't change color immediately
• It may take a couple of minutes (or hours) for the color to fade
• Some dyes don't show the effects of bleaching until after the bleach has been washed out with water
• To keep the bleach from spreading out too far, either wash it out before it's bleached through too much, or dry it (in sunlight or with a hand-held dryer or heat gun) before it has a chance to spread

• Remember to dry a defined-bleached area flat, to prevent the bleached area from "dripping"
• To create a feathered or fadeout effect, spray the edges of your bleached areas with water before the bleach has time to completely dry; keep an eye out to make sure it doesn't spread too far

Overdyeing

This is the process of adding a color to an existing color. It can be used to change the color of something: I once overdyed ten yards of bright orange twill with red and burgundy dyes to create a warm rose color for a costume; more recently, I tie-dye folded a shirt that had I'd spray bleached to get different color tie dye effects. After that dye run had dried, I refolded the garment and overdyed it with a different squirt-on tie dye. Several iterations later (including another bleach run), this is what I ended up with:

 Mixing in More Coloring Techniques

As you might have noticed from some of the earlier photos, I've heard "Blue Christmas" one too many times this season, and decided to have some pun with the title. 

• I sketched out the areas of the captions and ghosts with a black fabric marker (some white tailor's chalk would have done better). 
• Then I bleached out the "ghost" and "title" areas of the two shirts by painting them with a half-strength solution of household bleach. Using a paintbrush gave me good control over the areas I was bleaching; I used an inexpensive synthetic fiber brush to avoid the bleach destroying a natural-hair brush, and washed it out immediately afterwards.
• Some of the side "creep" of the white area on the royal blue shirt resulted from placing it a bit on edge before a sunny window (which is why I suggested drying flat in my bleaching tips above)
• The royal blue shirt only required small areas of craft paint to put details on the Elvis-impersonator ghosts; I also overpainted the word "boo" with pale blue metallic craft paint.

I took the punning a bit further on the heathered navy shirt, adding (Bob) Marley's ghost to the mix for the obligatory Dickensian reference. (I probably could have added past-present-future props to the backup singers, but didn't think of it at the time.) Since the navy only bleached to a pale brownish red, I used diluted white craft paint to paint in the ghosts and emphasize the text.

• In order to create the semi-spectral "Bob Marley" colors, I would have preferred to use straight liquid fabric dye for its transparency — but not having any in the appropriate colors, I mixed a couple drops of magenta and cyan dyes with yellow acrylic ink to create the red and green tones, respectively, and used the yellow ink directly for the yellow areas.
• I used bronze metallic paint mixed with yellow acrylic ink to create a more golden effect for the chains on both shirts, added in metallic green "Christmas trees" with metallic and glitter-dimensional-paint "red" decorations. (Again, I should have probably added white "snow" afterwards, but didn't think of it.)

Having run the pre-bleaching on these shirts tells me I should have used that, rather than trying to use a light color paint (and as close to a "dry brush" technique as I could on untreated fabric) to create the "glow" I wanted around the Christmas tree shirt I'd painted two weeks previously.

Which just goes to show that a bit of preparation and allowing yourself to play with the original colors of a t-shirt can do wonders in creating the effect you want.

Gingerbread, Gingerbread, What Is That Gingerbread?

It's that other gingerbread time of year — that is, not the time that owners of "painted ladies" (Victorian-style homes) search for, install, and/or maintain decoratively-cut and -painted exterior wood trim.

For those who consider gingerbread houses and decorated gingerbread men a family affair, Michaels held its annual family "MAKE A Gingerbread House" event on Saturday, December 2nd. This is a popular event at which we decorate the pre-assembled Wilton gingerbread houses we sell in the store.

Pre-assembled gingerbread takes the time sink out of waiting for each wall to set up long enough to stay upright before trying to add the roof with correctly-angled eaves, giving families the time to add the included royal icing to trim the roof and attach little candies all over the house.

Sticking to the pre-built makes it easier, but what if you want to take it a step further?

We still sell a number of Gingerbread House kits that have all the house pieces baked, and some even embossed with guidelines for drawing windows and doors. They come with bases just big enough to hold the house, instructions, and a moderate selection of candies for trimming. (We also sell the trimmings separately.) Gingerbread House kits are also sold at some larger supermarkets, and even at some of the large drugstore chains.

Other DIY options are using (or tweaking) a recipe to make your own gingerbread and either using a set of cookie cutters that will make a Wilton-style house, or cutting out a set of patterns which can be used to cut and trim your gingerbread before it goes into the oven.

A couple of things to remember about the DIY:

• There are three different types of baked gingerbread. One is a sort of spice cake, one is an edible cookie (suitable for gingerbread men), and one is a hard (but very hunidity-sensitive) cracker used for gingerbread-house construction.
• You can probably substitute any hard cookie that doesn't crumble easily and that stands up to moisture — certain sugar cookies and ginger snaps come to mind. (The Manishevitz Chanukah House is based on a vanilla sugar cookie. The Dylan's Candy Bar house uses a chocolate cookie base.) Cookies for gingerbread "men" are not generally strong enough to use for construction.
• Remember to account for the thickness of your walls and eaves when designing and cutting your construction pieces.
• The dimensions of your cut-and-baked gingerbread pieces must be exact, or your design may not fit together correctly. You may need to trim or weight pieces immediately after baking to minimize any warp or skew.
• Not all gingerbread construction has to be a house, or even a Christmas design. Years ago, I purchased a gingerbread construction book because I was blown away by the Victorian townhouse design it included. The first gingerbread building I constructed from scratch was a Valentine-themed "Love Shack". (It wasn't pretty, but it was unique.)
• Commercially-available gingerbread-house candy trimmings change in design from year to year. Since gingerbread houses are largely for show, some old candies might be OK for trimming. Gumdrops, however, get hard — and the instructions for reviving them don't always work.
• If you're cutting gumdrops, you need a sharp knife or scissors

Even if you follow the instructions, your construction might not end up as planned. Photograph it anyway: you might get a good story out of it. Case in point:

One of my Other Half's family traditions was his aunts' gift of a handmade ceramic church to the niece or nephew who had most recently married. It was time-consuming enough that they made only one church each year, and there was anticipation over "who would get the church this year". That aunt has since passed on, so the last time we went down for Christmas, I wanted to copy the book's gingerbread church as an homage to these two women.

I got the main building constructed and packed for a 300-mile road trip to Virginia. It made it there OK, just the roof fell off (easy to repair) and the back wall developed a crack, which I covered it with royal icing "ivy". The view you're seeing below is several hours on, when the roof decided it was at the wrong angle to attach properly to the back.

At no time did the "pediment" (the triangle that goes under the front eave and may or may not be supported by peppermint sticks) form the same angle as the church front and back, so I was never able to attach it to roof (nor was I able to find the right size peppermint sticks).

Now, this happened to be over that super hot and humid Christmas. The more I tried to fix the issues with the roof, the worse it got.

Roof cracking at the back

The best I was able to do was... not all that great — but at some time near oh-dark-hundred in the morning, I just had to leave it as it was and get some sleep. The following photos show the church at its best (which is admittedly not all that great).

 

Things were only worse in the morning.

Having had the overnight to sit in increasingly warm humidity, instead of drying, the moisture from the royal icing seeped into the church, making the roof even less stable than it was. Rather than bring it with us, we had to let it set at the house until our noon-ish break.

We returned to sheer disaster. The heat and humidity caused the roof to cave in, one of the side walls to fall outward, and the steeple to end up in the middle of what would have been the equivalent of aisles of pews. (Good thing there were no gingerbread parishoners in there at the time!)

 

So... no grand entry. No nice, pretty gingerbread church. But a story that I still have fun telling.

Wishing you many years of family gingerbread stories...