Sunday, May 13, 2012

Sharpie Tie-Dye

When my fabulous friend, and fellow crafty bod, Becky posted a link on her facebook wall to a tutorial for "Sharpie tie-dye", I HAD to try it. I've never been one from understated, or for that matter, particularly tasteful clothing, and when you combine this with the chance for yet another T shirt reconstruction, I couldn't really turn down this opportunity...
Combining this shirt...
Meh. With an emphasis on the 'eh'
 ...with this tutorial and a quick cut-down and re-build resulted in this little beauty...
Cute, non?
It took me a few days to finish colouring the entire shirt, mostly because I was feeling crumby and the smell of the alcohol and sharpies was giving me a corking headache. I'd guess I probably only spent a couple of hours on it altogether. As for technique, it's wicked simple and my not-quite 5 year old Bear was working on his own shirt with me. You stretch the clean shirt over the top of a plastic cup, holding it on with an elastic band, draw on your design with Sharpies, and then drop rubbing alcohol on to the ink and watch it spread. Anyway, this was the shirt once dying was complete... 

Front



Not the front...

 And now for a quick reconstruction to up the cute factor... I'm a big fan of tank tops, and so clearly this had to become one...

Using a [slightly broken, awaiting repair] cami as a pattern, pin down the side seams and then sew together. 


Once the side seams were taken in, I cut the neckline to the shape I wanted. Instead of rolling the hem or anything else fancy, I used the off-cuts of the shirt to create binding to finish the edges. I won't call it bias binding, because it's not cut on the bias. It's 1.5" wide strips, cut as long as the T shirt scraps would allow, folded around the raw edges of the neck and arm holes. The binding itself has raw edges left to fray/roll as they please, but because it's zig-zag stitched to the shirt it's not going anywhere and give enough stretch to make it comfy and wearable.


I'm stoked as to how well it turned out, and definitely will be getting a ton of wear from it this summer, especially as the warm weather seems to have finally made it to Massachusetts...



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