Createlivity: More weekend creations - freezer paper bleach resist dying

For Raine's birthday, my brother Carl made some awesome shirts for her. OK, he didn't really make the shirts, he decorated them. Expressly to her taste. Awesomely. She has been watching anime series on Netflix, and Soul Eater has been one of her favorites.

What a cool Birthday present!

He used a resist dying technique with bleach, and on Saturday, he came over and we both worked on shirts.

The first step is to decide on a designe, and make a pattern on freezer paper. Having just returned from Wild Wild West Con, I was in steampunk mode and wanted gears. Ron found a gear stencil for me to use, and my first pattern looked like this:

busy busy busy

I gave up on cutting that out pretty quickly, as you can tell. The border wasn't going to work well as I had done it, and the more I looked at it, the more I felt like the number of gears was just going to end up looking muddy. So I started again.

Once you get the design onto the butcher paper, and you have cut out the parts that you want to apply the bleach to, you iron it on to the shirt. 100% cotton works best, but Carl used a shirt that wasn't. I don't know if it was because of the fiber content or what, but it was really difficult to tell whether the color was changing when he was bleaching it, but it came out like this, so you know it worked.

thundercats are cool

When you bleach them, you use a 50-50 solution of bleach and water, and Carl had a very small spray bottle. You want to be able to control where the bleach is going You also want to cover as much of the area you don't want to bleach as possible. Oh yeah, and don't forget to put a layer of cardboard between the front and back layers of the shirt. You don't want the bleach to bleed through.

Carl did some fiddly bits on his other shirt, with Mr Mets on it. I think it came out really well!

A sports team shirt for Fridays where he works.

Check out the small lines he had to make and how neatly he did it! Not sure I have the patience or the steady hand necessary for that fine work.

Once you spray on some bleach, you blot it off with some paper towels (Doesn't hurt to wear protective gloves for the spraying process). Spray bleach and blot 3 or 4 times, as your fabric and design seem to need. Then, dunk the shirt in water, to get the bleach out. You don't really want it sitting on the shirt too long. After the sink rinse, throw them in the washer for a wash and dry.

I am happy with how my gears came out, though. My second attempt was much more managable, and the stencil was really useful for making the border once I figured out how I should do that.