Tie-dye June 2008

Remember the last baby boom? The Smart Bohemian and I tie-dyed 25 onesies last Sunday.

A friend/neighbor dyed three t-shirts; one new and two refashions.

His son and Iris dyed 4 shirts. the 5th one is from Iris' class project last Fall.

I refashioned Iris' ghost costume from a few Halloweens back. It will be my contribution to "The elephant in the room". See the cutout for her face? The lopped off corner attests that the ghost costume was itself a refashion. A triple use item.

"THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM" will be a giant group-built elephant sculpture (created by Beth Elliott) upon which participants can sit and pose for a photo. Democrat, Republican, Independent--everyone has a different "elephant in the room" re: public education funding. The Elephant (non-partisan, chosen only for structural stability) welcomes all--as in the barndance, all comers are invited to take a whirl.

A closeup of a tank top for myself. I used Sapphire Blue and Better Black, which is supposed to give blue-toned edges. It came out more brown than black.

Remember the stitched heart? We gathered up the string, then put a rubber band over it. Then we put rubber bands above and below that, to make a triple heart. Then we threw it into a ziploc bag with 3 cups of dye activator and 1/2 a cup of Fire Red dye solution.

Perhaps we should have massaged the bag a bit more to make the shirt more even. Iris seems happy with it and that is what matters. We dyed a gauzy dream skirt in the same shade. This bag was massaged assiduously to produce an even shade.

Fire red on the left, sunrise red on the right. Note how the edges of sunrise red are yellow? The dye powder starts out yellow, then turns red when wetted.

There's more. I will post the rest later. I should mention that we used the same dye activator solution in the dye recipes posted here, but we dissolved 1 TABLESPOON of dye instead of one teaspoon per cup of water. (Except for the fuchsia, which we left at 1 teaspoon.) That is why the colors are more saturated than the ones I showed before.


Aside:
Iris started her own blog; the link is on the right. I have no idea what she is going to say. I am just her typist. She also started a weekly newspaper. We divided up the beats. She wouldn't let me cover fashion because she says I have such a terrible fashion sense. She also wouldn't let me do book reviews because she plans on doing all the reviewing herself.

She gave me Op-Ed when I asked for it because she didn't know what that was.