Cherry Blossom Bow Ties

For those of you who don't know, my favorite crafty pastime is making bow ties.  I've made so many different ones, and I've learned so many different dying techniques in the process.  I've learned how to dip dye, ombré, and tie dye.

A watermelon I'm quite fond of.

Tie dyed Mardi Gras puppy bow tie

I was thinking of things that I haven't tried yet, and I realized I haven't done much in the way of painting.  Inspired by the impending springtime, I thought I'd try my hand at painting some cherry blossoms.

I soaked a solid white tie in water to help the dye absorb better.

The first thing to do was to prepare a background.  I figured a nice light blue for the sky would be a good effect.  I ombréd the blue the same way I usually do.  First, I added a little bit of water to my little plastic tub and got a solid white bow tie nice and soaked.  Then, I took the tie out, and added a kettle full of boiling hot water.  I eyeballed roughly a half cup of salt, which nicely dissolved immediately.  I ended up adding 3 teaspoons of Aquamarine Rit Dye.

Note the vinyl gloves.  Learn from your mistakes, kids.  Especially when you have to keep your nails painted for four solid months because you accidentally dyed them purple while making tights.

I don't usually worry about the neck strap too much when I dye because it ends up being hidden under the shirt collar anyway.  I accidentally got some drops of concentrated dye on the tie, so I just decided that would be the darker side.  I didn't let the dye sit too long, since I wanted a nice light blue.  The color always turns out a little bit lighter once it dries, so I pulled it out when it was just slightly darker than what I wanted.

Fresh out the dye bath.

After rinsing in my bathroom sink, the dorm gods smiled down upon me and graced me with an available washing machine.  I live in a building made to house 150+ people, and there are only 4 washers.  One of them is currently broken.  This building was not planned particularly well.

Freshly washed, hanging out to dry.

Once it dried, it ended up fading to a beautiful light blue color.  It's always tricky figuring out exactly how long to leave the dye to set, especially when it dries so drastically different from the wet color.  I guess I just got lucky this time.

Perfect sky background color.

Next came the actual painting.  I have never done this before, so I figured a few practice branches and flowers on a test scrap of fabric would probably be a good idea.  Once I painted, I realized that since I was using so little paint on the fabric itself, I didn't worry about it bleeding through.  Even if it did, I could cover it up with an identical stroke on either side.

I decided on larger branches with dots instead of individual petals.

The best part about nature is that it rarely follows a straight line.  As a result, I could pretty much take the branches in any direction I wanted.

Branches that look like veins ready for petals.

On the test strip, I realized I like the look of red layered under pink petals, so I scattered dots along the branches in red first, then pink.  I added a few blowing in the wind, as well.

Ready for pink.

I'm not going for anything too terribly realistic, so there are a lot of petals floating around in space.  At first, I was reluctant to add the pink, since the red looked so good on its own.  Once I did though, I was quite pleased with the result.

The final product.

Hopefully within the next few days, the rain will subside enough to go outside and, with my lovely model Casey, take a few pictures in the sunlight so the colors will show up better.  He doesn't know about this yet, so that'll be fun.  It doesn't rain often in Florida, but when it does, it rains nonstop for 4 days.  At least it hasn't been colder than 61 degrees this week.

Check back eventually for updates with better pictures!  I'm not sure why I was so shaky this time around.

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!