Ombre Tights

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Freshly rinsed

Now I just have to wait for them to dry to see how they turned out.

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!