Tie Dying Tee shirts

Well it all started with our daughter's family making plans to go to Disney World the second week of August this year 2013.  They came to visit the weekend before July 4th, and since I had seen a tutorial recently about making tie dye Micky shirts, I asked them to bring a white shirt so they could decorate it.  The site to go to so that you can get the patterns is Mickey's Patriotic Tees.  This site is affiliated with Disney somehow, so these shirts are legal to make.  Maybe not to sell though.

The first shirts came out pretty well.   We placed the shirts in soda ash water then tied them with rubber bands, mixed up the procion dye colors with water , then put that on the shirts.  Covered the shirts with plastic for two days.  then rinsed them out, washed them in the washing machine, a couple of times to get all of the excess dye out, then dried them in the dryer.

What did I learn?  The colors in the first shirts came out great.  The second batch of shirts I  did one month later.  I used the first batch of dye I had mixed with only water.  I only needed yellow so mixed up yellow as a new color.  Even though the dye was mixed with only water, and the tops were capped, the colors had lost some of their brilliance and they came out faded looking.  I also noticed that Mickey didn't show up well when I put yellow over the stitched areas.  Not enough contrast.  So in the future I will throw away or somehow right away use up the dye I've mixed up.

I don't have enough time to make up another batch of shirts as I have to mail these off so they can take them to Disney.

Picture time:

This is my grandson's first shirt, I helped him with the stitching
as they had us sewing with dental floss, which was difficult to pull through two layers of tee shirt.
Both he and his mom wanted the identical pattern on the back.
Then they did the dyeing.

This is the second batch of shirts that I did, as they had gone home.
I ened up pinning the front and back together so they would remain the same while stitching.

You take your pattern, (this was blown up 1.5 X), and you trace around it in pencil.

The next step, you stitch on your pencil lines.  Do the Mickey head first, because if you haven't
got quite enough floss to go all the way around you can pull it up some to finish.  You want only one length of floss around the head, and then one separate length of floss on the circle around the head.  If you do Mickey first and have to pull it up some you can still go around the circle.  However, if you do the circle first and have to draw it up, it's much more difficult to do Mickeys head.

Here it is all stitched out.  Then you pull the ends of the floss on the lead together as tight as you can make it.
Tie the floss in a knot and snip the floss about 1/2 inch from the knot.  Then you pull up the circle in the same manner, as tight as you can get it, knot the floss and snip 1/2 inch from the knot.

This is what it looks like all pulled up, kind of looks like a mouse head!

Since I used Procion dye from Dharma Trading I needed to soak the tees in a solution of
1 cup of Soda Ash to 1 gal of water, for 15 or so minutes.  Then I squeeze the excess water out of them.
They are ready to put dye on them.  The soda ash acts as a fixer for the dye.

My dye has been mixed with water and put into squeeze type bottles and labled with their colors.

I use plastic bins to do my tie dying over.  I find that using plastic bins, I can wash them out and re-use them over and over.  This bin has nylon window screening clipped over it using clothes pins to clip it to the bin's edge.  I always put dye ready fabric in the bottom of the bins to catch any drips.  Those are always a surprise.  On these three, I couldn't find the rest of my rubber bands to tie the rows of colors.  I found them later on my wrist which were under my rubber gloves.   Duh!

This is my smaller bin, that I have a grate that I bought at Goodwill.  What I try to do is to keep Mickeys head
off to one end so that the colors won't mix into it.

I have found in the past that waiting 48 hours instead of 24 hours of resting under the plastic provides the best colors.
Here I am starting the rinsing process.  Using cold water I rinse them off in the sink.  I take off the rubber bands and carefully take out the floss.  Rinse again.

Then I fill a 5 gal bucket with cold water and let them sit in it for an hour or so.
I may do the bucket routine a couple more times.  After I'm done with the bucket rinses, I take them down to the washing machine and use hot water and run them through a minimum of two full wash/rinse cycles.  Then they get thrown in the dryer.

My Grandson's second shirt.  Notice how orange the red color came out,
and the blue and green are quite faded.

My daughters second shirt.  This is not a plain tee shirt, it's a wrap front tee, very light weight.

A close up of Mickey on my daughter's shirt.

My son-in law's first shirt.

My son-in law's second shirt as he didn't get to make one the first time around.

Se how good Mickey's head shows up.  A much better contrast.

There will be more dying in  my future, I'm having so much fun!

Sew see you later,

Bette

Making Your Own Stamps

  Western Theme -We are the Star B Ranch!  Here are bandannas!

Two sample Bandannas I printed with the stamps I made.

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  I've been working on VBS crafts lately.  There are two of us who head up the VBS crafts for our church.  This year the theme is western.  Our area is the Cow Poke Crafts.  One of the main things the kids are making are bandannas.  We've purchased plain white cotton bandannas for them to mark on.  In the process of trying to figure out the best way to make marks, I decided to make some stamps.  I tried some sponges, but they didn't stamp well enough.  Then I remembered that craft foam works really well to make stamps.  I bought a package of sticky back foam sheets.  

I layered two craft foam sheets then drew around a paper pattern.
I found that they cut better if I drew on the side that was foam.  This is the
side that will be used for the stamp.  The other side is covered with paper over the sticky film.

Then I cut them out with small scissors.

Here I am sticking the stamp to another piece of craft foam.

I have added some detail on the stamp with a pen.   These will show up  when printing.
I also have cut the backing foam close to the stamp so as to minimize the spill over of paint.

This is a close up of the boot stamps.

I made horses, cowboys, cowboy hats, stars, letter B, cactus, and boots.   Remember if you are doing words or letters to make them backwards so when they are printed they will come out the right way.  I will follow up with more crafts we will be doing.

Sew see you later,
Bette

May 2013

WOW - May is here and almost gone!
One of the first things I did was to go on our kayak group (the Ka-yackers) annual trip.

One of our past members now lives in Savannah, GA.  So we make an annual trek to go kayaking with her.  Below are pictures from that trip.  When you come to the cypress trees use your imagination and see what you can see in them.   I've numbered them from one to fourteen.   Drop me a line and let me know what you see, please include the number when you leave a comment!

The main beach at Tybee Island

All of us ready to kayak on Ebeneezer Creek.  I'm the last one on the right.

#1

#2

#3

#4

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

A caterpillar that hitched a ride for awhile.

#11

#12

#13

#14

Our second day of kayaking  in a different area.

Going through the marshes.

The bridge is lifting up to let a sailboat through.

Sunset form our friends home.

Thanks for joining me on our trip to Savannah.

Sew see you later,

Bette

Garden

My hill garden, which is my main one, is looking like "Easter" colors right now.

I am a "lazy" gardener, and once planted I let God take over.  Most of the time it works.

 

Sew see you later,

Bette

Needle Felting

I've got to confess.  There are people who LOVE to needle felt, especially by machine.  I have not been one of those people.

Our program at Explorers (read yesterday's post) this month is on needle felting.  I said I would lead it if no one else came forth.  I adjusted my attitude toward needle felting, so here I am, ready to lead the program tomorrow.  Last week I went to a friends house to make my samples on her felting machine as I have not gotten one......yet.

It actually was the first time that I kind of had fun with it.  Maybe my attitude adjustment?
Below are pictures of my samples.

This is washed wool from a skirt I bought at Goodwill.  I used wool yarn to felt onto the wool fabric.

This is a piece of Nylon (or polyester) curtain fabric.  I tried to felt wool roving on it.
Polyester and Nylon do not felt well and fibers do not felt well on them.
Any sheer fabric that is used crinkles up like on the right side.  That could be a cool effect.

I've taken the same curtain fabric as above, but this time I put solve on the bottom, layered with the curtain fabric
then wool roving and wool yarn, and topped it with solvey.  I wanted to see if the solvey kept the fabric from crinkling up.  The part on the right has been washed, the part on the left is before washing the solvey out.  With the solvey, the sheer fabric did NOT crinkle up nearly as much, but because it is synthetic fabric the needle felting was not very successful.

This sample is done on burlap!  It worked really well.  This is the back side, and almost looks like a smiley face.

Turn the above sample over and here is the front.  I used cotton fabric, wool roving,
silk roving, silk ribbon, silk taffeta, wool yarn, and eyelash yarn.

This is wool roving on cotton velveteen.  It also was
a very successful sample.

This sample is done on acrylic felt.  On the left side I used a variety on yarns.  This could be cut up
and used as ATC's.  The one on the right includes some Angelina.  When you use something
like Angelina you need to needle some wool or silk roving on top to hold it down.

As close- up of the above.

The backing for this is cotton Home Dec fabric.  It also felted successfully.

This is the last piece I did.  I am going to make it into a cover for  one of my sketchbooks.

The pictures don't really do the samples justice.

Tomorrow at 1PM if you are in/near Lynchburg VA come to the program and play with us at Quilted Expressions on Old Forest Rd.

Sew see you later

Bette