Being involved in a musical takes up a lot of time. Especially serving as a member of the cast and being on production staff, most of my time in the past four weeks was dedicated to doing various things. Whether I was practicing my songs, staging choreography, or even just driving people from place to place, the show dominated my life. Now that it's over, I'm not entirely sure what I should do.
Let's start with dying some tights.
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| Hello World's Most Flattering Camera Angle |
I saw a couple pictures and tutorials about dip-dying tights, and with my love of all things dye
and unwillingness to shell out $40 for a pair of ombre tights, I had to give it a shot.
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| I don't have fancy backgrounds. Just my door. |
I made the blue ones, loved them, and decided to try my hands at a black and red pair, similar to
these. I figured this would be a cool thing to post, so I went ahead and documented how I did it.
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| Every tutorial needs a shot of materials. |
The tights themselves were
these in ivory from JCPenny. They were on sale for $10 a pair, so I figured why not? I got them in an XL since the store was out of larges, but they ended up a little more sheer than I anticipated, so I'm glad I got the XL. However, the most important factor of choosing these was the fabric blend. These particular ones are 86% nylon and 14% spandex. For those of you who may not know, Rit dye doesn't work on certain types of fibers. Spandex is one of them. The website says that as long as 60% of the blend is one that can be dyed, the color will take. Since the ratio of nylon to spandex was so high, I ended up with a really good color saturation.
I use plastic storage bins whenever I'm dying relatively small amounts of cloth. They're pretty cheap, and that way I don't have to worry about staining any good bowls or tubs or pots and the like. I have two one-quart mason jars that I use to collect hot water and to do the actual mixing in. I like to use a chopstick for stirring because they're cheap and a good length for the jars. For measuring, I commandeered my mother's measuring spoons. It's okay, I got her new ones. After laying down a towel that I don't particularly care if it gets discolored, I was ready to go to town.
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| This is my favorite part. |
The first thing I did was mix the dye. I just used hot tap water straight from the faucet. I live in a dorm, so it's probably not as hot as it could be, but I think it worked just fine. Next, I mixed the colors. In each jar, I put 4 teaspoons of wine, and two teaspoons of tangerine. The dye colors, not actual wine and fruit. When I did a test strip, the color was a little more purple than I wanted, so I added a teaspoon of scarlet and that gave me a nice red color.
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| Use a chopstick if you don't want to get your hands dirty. |
After I poured the dye into the tub, it was time to submerge the tights. Last night when I did the blue, I ended up sort of easing some space into each leg because the dye wasn't spreading evenly, but I didn't have a problem with it this time around.
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| The blue finally came off from last night. Just in time to be replaced by red. |
I really wanted a deep blood red color, so I let the tights sit in the red dye for about 10 minutes. Then I rinsed the tights and the tub with cold water in the shower. Looking at the red droplets all over the shower, I was really happy no surprise room inspections happened.
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| Note the red hand on the left corner. The colors were actually much darker than they appear here. |
Next, I mixed the black dye. I put two tablespoons of black dye into each jar, mixed, then poured it in the tub. Then comes the hard part. I have a little bit of experience with dip-dying, since I used a lot of that in making bow ties over the summer. I started it the same way I always do by doing one really quick dip of the entire thing (starting at the legs) into the dye. The dye was a lot more pigmented than I thought and it started out a lot darker than I thought. Looking back, it probably would have been better to start farther down since the color did diffuse upward a little bit and soften. I moved the tights up about 2 inches, then let the dye sit for 5 minutes. I moved the tights up about another 4 inches and let it sit for 5 more minutes. As I got closer to the bottom, I started letting the dye sit for about 10 minutes to really get a rich black color.
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| Note the dye splashed all over the place. I accidentally moved the tub too fast. There's a physics problem in there somewhere. We're learning fluid mechanics this week, so I'll let you know when we get to it. |
When I finally finished, I rinsed everything out in the shower again, went downstairs, and threw them in the wash with a towel because I feel weird washing any one article of clothing by itself. I threw in some underwear when I washed the blue ones last night. I took a gamble because I noticed that the underwear was made of fabric that Rit couldn't dye, so I wasn't too worried about the color bleeding. Lucky for me, that logic seemed to work and I don't have any blue undies that aren't supposed to be blue.
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| Freshly rinsed |
Now I just have to wait for them to dry to see how they turned out.
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| Fresh out of the washer. |
They ended up a little more purple than I anticipated, but since I couldn't decide between red and black and different shades of purple earlier, I'm not too upset.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see how they look once they've dried!
