Go Red for Blue Fridays

The first Friday of February has been, for the past decade or more, a day to wear red to remember Women's Heart Health. It's important because women's cardiac symptoms are often very different from men's, and tend to be ignored — yet heart disease and heart-health-related causes are the most common cause of death among women.

It's been a bit of a dilemma for me to wear red since the Diabetes Online Community started the practice of wearing blue on Fridays for Diabetes Awareness, and I've been living with type 2 diabetes for the past seventeen years. (The irony is even greater when one considers that living with any type of diabetes raises one's risks for heart disease and heart-related death, and that the diabetes that caused the heart-related death is often ignored in the post-mortem.)

Some years, I'll honor both by wearing a blue base layer with a red short-sleeved shirt. This year, I decided to use bleach, dye, and my Cricut to create a blue-edged T-shirt with both Go Red and World Diabetes Day (WDD) logos.

My original idea was to have the blue circles ringing around the sleeves, half into the blue-dyed areas; I was debating whether to go with a heart, a red dress, or the American Diabetes Association's "Stop Diabetes!" hand on the body...


I started with two Gildan crew-neck t-shirts — one in Heather Red and one in Antique Cherry Red. The Heather Red bleached to a very pale pink, enough to pass for white.

The Antique Cherry Red, based on black and magenta, didn't do as well. The black parts turned out to be permanent to bleach, leaving me with something closer to a Sport Gray.

There is a risk to trying multiple methods of color removal on a single fabric, and that is that each treatment weakens the fabric to the point of tearing or disintegration. (Note: bleaching animal fibers — wool, silk, alpaca, etc. — will dissolve the fabric. While bleach can weaken linen and cotton, they are generally safe to bleach.) Nevertheless, I tried Rit Color Remover on the gray sections. It didn't do anything to the color. Nor did a couple of patch tests of ordinary household peroxide...

After the color removal process, I dip-dyed the hem and sleeve edges of both T-shirts in concentrated fabric dye and let them set for a day before washing out the excess. Unfortunately I missed on the color and the blue was a bit too red to do the rings of blue circles, so I had to settle for putting single circles on a white flag (per the World Diabetes Day logo use requirements). I also wanted to do things quickly, so I settled on the Go Red dress cut out from a white heart. I cut these from my Cricut and prepared to iron them on.

It was at this point that my concerns regarding the color removal process came to light. While pre-pressing, I found a couple of small holes in the blue-dyed portions of the Antique Cherry Red shirt. OK, I figured, I might just have to wear the shirt tucked in...

The holes only got worse as I ironed on my designs. I did wear that shirt for my morning shift at work, but it was largely covered up by an overlayer. Taking it off, I ripped a couple new holes in the sleeve.

Aside from the vinyl heart being too large and too low, the rest of the T-shirt designs came out OK. I wore the Heather Red shirt later that day, and along with presenting my usual Red Dress Cookies, it was a great Wear Red day.

B'reishith: Creation of a Multiprocess T-Shirt

The other day, I got an idea for a T-shirt for Simchat Torah, the holiday that celebrates our rejoicing over finishing the annual public reading of the Torah and the beginning of the next year's cycle. I wanted to start with a black or navy T-shirt and a bleach resist process to create a bit of a glow around the image of a Torah, with the word "B'reishith" ("In the beginning") in the center, and a flared star behind the last letter (Taf). The idea was to echo the concept of separating the light from the darkness, the First Day.

As the design formed in my mind, it echoed the words of two religions:

In the beginning, [The Name] created the heaven and the earth. [Gen. I:1]

In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Word was G-d... [Luke I:1]

Having had some questions about bleeding with a paper resist, and wanting an effect that would be produced by bleaching onto a damp shirt, I chose to use a reverse stencil to set up a wax resist for batik. My original plan for the stencil was to cut a piece of plastic poster board, which I've found to be an excellent and inexpensive stencil base. (Note: it does need to be cut down to fit through a Cricut or other home cutter.) My first cut, set at "stencil vinyl", didn't penetrate the plastic. My second, set for "Stencil Vinyl" (pressure 171), didn't penetrate completely. I tried cutting again set at "Stencil Film - 0.4 mm" (pressure 341), but forgot to reposition my cut, so I ended up ruining the stencil material for this particular use and had to use Cricut Stencil Vinyl instead.

[Aside: I was completely underwhelmed by Cricut Stencil Vinyl. It had an adhesive back, which meant the stencil stuck to itself as I tried to remove it from the backer film, and it was so thin that my stencil tore in several places. It didn't easily lend to using both the original and the reverse stencil, and it doesn't lend easily to stencil reuse.]

After much materials wrangling, I finally positioned my stencil in place and waxed my resist area. Removing the stencil was another chore, as my wax was harder than the stencil material and I would still need the stencil for the final splatter paint.

I dampened the shirt and started spritzing bleach. I probably should have bleached first and watered later, since the glow area wasn't as bleached as I would have liked, and extended much further than I would have liked.

After bleaching and wax removal

After washing to remove the remainder of the beeswax, I applied various splotches of fabric dye and water bleeds to bring the bleached area back to about where I wanted it. Overdyeing didn't help as much as I would have liked, but it did add a lovely layer of complexity to the shirt.

After overdyeing

Next, my lettering. After a bit of hemming and hawing, I chose silver foil (to mimic the "dressings" we have on many real-life torahs) for the letters and a silvery holographic vinyl for the "star". Choosing Shlomo STAM for my typeface was a no-brainer, since I wanted to echo the formality and divinity of the Sefer Torah. Unfortunately the holographic vinyl didn't show up as well as I wanted, and neither vinyl wanted to adhere well at the fussy, tiny points.

I finished up the shirt by reapplying the stencil to the entire torah area and splattering the shirt with silver Liquitex acrylic ink and silver Ph. Martin pen ink to create th effect of stars in the firmament surrounding the Book of Creation, separating the Earth from the Heavens...

Completed T-shirt

"B'reishith" is a one-off, an "artist t-shirt". But I'd like to take another go at trying to simplify the process of something a bit closer to my original vision.