Here's one of the gifts that I made for Christmas. The final product is a sleep shirt with writing on it made with a dye resist. If you go to my sidebar and click on my Pinterest button, you can see the full tutorial that I used to make this sleep shirt. My Pinterest pins are not in any kind of order, so you'll have to search through the pictures until you see a pinkish shirt with writing on it.
I started with writing my words on a piece of paper and enclosed the paper in a page protector. I didn't want to write freehand and I was afraid that the ink might leach off onto the shirt.
Here's the shirt, all ready for writing with the dye resist. As you can see, I've found yet another use for the Clover Wonder Clips. I put a cutting mat between the layers of the shirt (between the front and back) and slid the page protector between them too. I taped the page protector to the mat to keep things from potentially sliding around. The shirt was dampened before writing.
This is the shirt after I've applied the dye resist for the lettering. In this case, the dye resist was Elmer's blue gel glue. The directions specifically called for this glue, not white glue.
After it sat overnight to dry, it looked like this. My neat letters spread out, although I don't feel like I used too thick of a glue line. It could have been my t-shirt fabric, how much water I used to dampen the shirt, etc. Most of it was dry by morning and the areas that weren't completely dry were dried with a hair dryer.
The t-shirts are in the dye bath. I used good ol' Rit dye, the powdered version, for the dye. Again, following the Pinterest instructions, not the instructions on the dye box, they were died in a cold bath. I guess a hot bath would have melted the dye resist. Just not sure about this but my color was not very dark, in spite of a long bath (over 30 minutes).
Here's the finished product, after being washed and dried. The color is much lighter than I wanted and I expect it will fade fairly quickly after further washings. The overall effect is what I wanted, but I think I can improve on the process if I do this again.
I made two shirts. One that says "Patti's Husband" and the other which says "David's Wife." They were fun to make and I can see using this glue resist for other projects too. I've always used hot wax as my dye resist. Although it may be tough to get out of the fabric, I think it would do a much better job than the glue gel. Now back to my favorite crafting.....sewing!
