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...

Magic Loop or DPN, That is the Question

Going Round In Circles

When Mom knitted hats and socks — which are usually knitted in the round — she used double-pointed needles (dpns). Sometimes they came in a set of four, other times in a set of five. For a set of n needles, you divided the stitches evenly over n-1 needles and used the last needle as the needle you were knitting onto. As the stitches moved from one of the stitch-holding needles to the working needle, the stitch-holding needle became free. Now that needle was used to work the next needle's worth of stitches, and so on.

(Results for "double pointed needles" on YouTube.)

When I knitted Donovan B. Bear his first hand-knit sweater (an Irish Fisherman style sweater, done traditionally from the neck down), I found it difficult to work a teddy-bear-sized sleeve in the round over those four or five needles. The stitches would become stretched, and the long ends of the needles got in the way of the work. I ended up having to use six or eight needles to work the small, narrow sleeves.

Magic Loop

Magic Loop is a circular-needle technique that, for many people, replaces double-pointed needles. Instead of rotating through free and stitch-holding needles, one uses a single, long-cable circular needle, keeps a few stitches on the needles but leaves most on the cable, and pulls out the cable between stitches to create a comfortable knitting space. YouTube demonstrations show this method working with as few as four stitches.

(Results for "Magic Loop" on YouTube.)

The biggest advantage to Magic Loop, as far as I can tell, is that it's easier to pack up your knitting and go: just slide all your stitches onto the cable, and slide them back onto the needles when you are ready to pick up again. (This is also one of the reasons circular and flexible needles are becoming popular for flat knitting: tip protectors can come off, allowing stitches to fall off a loaded needle, and one can't always complete a row or round when knitting on a train or bus, or at a Ravelry group meeting.) With double-pointed needles, there's a much greater chance your work will slide off a needle and require you to back-track.

Advantages to Magic Loop

• Today, it's a lot easier to find circular knitting needles in a given size than it is to find dpns
• The ends of non-active double-pointed needles can get in the way working with your active needles
• Unless they come with an organizing sleeve, it's harder to keep a set of dpns together — and when they come apart, you need a needle size gauge to be able to figure out what size a needle is, or to put together a set from all of the random dpns in the bottom of your needle drawer. (That said, many circular needles don't have the size printed on them, either, and if you lose their packaging...)

Despite those advantages, for the most part I hate Magic Loop. 

Advantages to Double-Pointed Needles

• I feel that Magic Loop distorts my knitting and forces a looser knit, especially on the fine yarns (such as sock yarns) for which it is usually used.
• I feel like I'm spending all my time slipping stitches onto and off of the needles and cables, rather than actually knitting
• Slipping the cable loop out between small, tight stitches aggravates the tendinitis in my hands (although part of that might be a stiffer-than-ideal cable)
• If I need to slip out the cable loop where it meets the needle, or bend the cable at that join, I fear that the stress on the connection will lead to needle failure

It Depends on You, and on the Project

Because I was moving between (and trying out) various needle sizes (and the yarn kept sliding off my dpns), I ended up doing my fisherman's rib cap using Magic Loop and and interchangeable needles. On the bulky yarn, it wasn't too bad. But right now, I'm working on some handwarmers, and Magic Loop has been a Magic Pain. Switching back to dpns is saving the project.

Fishing for Brioche Ribbing (Not Just for Breakfast Any More)

The first bread cookbook I ever purchased mentioned brioche as a particularly difficult-to-make bread which is usually baked in a special fluted (ribbed) pan. While "brioche buns" have become popular in fast-food establishments, I still haven't had the experience of eating a real, fresh-from-the-oven, French brioche.

Some years later, a knitters' stitch guide I purchased included a photo of what I'd considered a particularly elegant set of patterns called "brioche rib" and "contrary brioche stitch". While I still haven't tried them out, the important thing to note is that these patterns were designed for single-color knitting.

Today, many knitting patterns with "brioche" in their names are made in a rib technique where alternating rows are either "knit below" (k1b) or "purled below" (p1b) to create a two-color rib, with the prominent "knit" stitches showing in one color and the recessed "purl" stitches in the second color. On the opposite side of the work, the colors are reversed.

I used the yarn leftover from the Koala Basket project to do up Red Heart's "Brioche Rib Fisherman's Hat". It's not that I have a lot of opportunity to wear hats (I commute by bicycle, so most of my time outdoors in cold weather is in technical cycling clothing), but rather that I wanted to learn this increasingly popular style of knitting. After a few false starts, I got the hang of the technique. After that, the bulky yarn worked up quickly.

Searching for more about brioche knitting, I found a whole website devoted to brioche stitch techniques — and I learned that what I thought was a brioche rib, and what a lot of what the mainstream knitting press has been calling "brioche rib" for the past thirty-some-odd years is actually "fisherman's rib", (and that true brioche stitch uses yarn-overs (yo) combined with adjacent stitches to create depth and stretch). But I also learned that in the Netherlands, the terms "brioche rib" and "fisherman's rib" are used interchangeably. Go figure?

While working on the hat's briochefisherman's rib-knitted brim, I decided I'd like to try making a briochefisherman's-rib-style sleeveless jacket for Donovan B. Bear in a #5 or #6 yarn. I think it could look very stylish because of, rather than despite, the yarn's disproportionate weight. And now that I know the difference, I need to learn the real brioche stitch and variations. So many project ideas, so little time!

The Great Fabric Medium Experiment, Part IV

I finally got some time to finish up my patch tests. Instead of buying another new T-shirt just to paint up, I pulled an old, bleach-stained blue T-shirt from the rag pile. This means that as colors become less opaque, the perceived color will shift towards the blue, rather than towards the red. I shouldn't see an issue with more opaque colors, and the increasing thickness of the paints in my test suggested that my colors would be more opaque.

The last three paints

As you can see, that was not quite the case. While there was little color shift with the dark Martha Stewart Multi-Surface Satin Acrylic Craft Paint in Chipotle, both the Folk Art Acrylic paint in Wicker White and the Liquitex Acrylic Paint in Light Portrait Pink showed significant opacity issues with fabric-medium dilution. Also, the Folk Art paint — which I had expected to be a better quality craft acrylic paint and more opaque than the Martha Stewart paint — showed the same opacity issues as the other acrylic paints. (This might be an issue of the particular pigment: Folk Art also offers a Titanium White, which is considered to be a more-opaque white pigment.)

Also noteworthy: the Folk Art paint was also subject to the same sort of bleeding exhibited by the most fluid paints.

Opacity Issues, Random Controls

The blue shirt also has a couple of control swatches: on the top left, I have Americana Shading Flesh by itself, and Golden High Flow Acrylic Cerulean Blue Hue both by itself and diluted 1:1 with GAC-900. The difference between these color swatches and those on the red shirt suggest that even apparently opaque paints are subject to color shift on colored fabrics. There's also an open square of GAC-900 by itself, It has discolored the fabric, but I'm looking to see how it will work as either a surface prep (like gesso) or a resist. Similarly, there's a closed square of Delta Ceramcoat Textile Medium on the right side, along with a rectangle of Fabric Creations Soft Fabric Ink in Yellow (which is not nearly as opaque as it had appeared to be when creating my "Star Struck Person With  Headscarf" portmanteauji T-shirt).

Preliminary Observations

Before heat treating, my impression is that for any non-fabric-specific acrylic paint thicker than Golden High Flow Acrylic, the paint swatches are very stiff until we get to a 1:1 paint-to-medium ratio. Unfortunately, this is the point at which pigment dilution issues start to become obvious. Also, since all of the fabric mediums were thinner than all but the Liquitex  Professional Acrylic Ink and the Golden High Flow Acrylic, the lower the paint-to-medium ratio, the higher the likelihood of bleeding.

Because of pigment dilution, a more concentrated pigment is needed for better results on non-white surfaces. This suggests that our usual method of painting T-shirts with craft paints is probably the least effective method for getting a good result.

The samples were done with a single coat of paint, with a second layer applied to the upper half of the Apple Barrel and Americana control samples; a second coat may be necessary (but may further stiffen the textile).

Next step, heat treatment.