Craft Challenge Week 8: How to Transform your old clothes using bleach, bands and your imagination

Everyone has out dated or old t-shirts kicking around the bottom of the wardrobe never to be seen again, they go to that secret place where odd socks live!

Or maybe like me, you’re a bit of a hippie and can’t afford all the cool clothes from specialist hippie stores or even like my friend you want something funky and different to wear but are male and stuck with choice a.) Plain or b.) Wise cracks about beer or ‘birds’.

Well how about getting your creativity on and transforming your style at the same time.

How?

Bleaching tees!

This is also a great activity to do with kids during summer boredom or to keep the mischievous little monsters busy!!!

What you will need:

A t-shirt
Spray bottle like you get for gardening
Bleach
Big basin of warm water
Decorative Supplies

1.) Gather or make your decoration – for example you can get your kids to gather leaves and twigs or shells and flowers and make this a fun outdoorsy activity or for the more creative you could draw out your own stencil using card and a Stanley knife. If you are not doing this outside make sure you are in a well arrogated room!
2.) Lay out your t-shirt flat (old/new whatever though pre-washed is better) and place an old towel between the front and the back i.e. inside your shirt.
3.) Place your leaves or beads or crisp packets or neat stencils, whatever you are using in a pattern on your t-shirt – remember that when we spray it with bleach it will be the uncovered parts of the t-shirt that form the design.
4.) Fill your spray bottle with a pretty strong solution of bleach ( get all the children to take cover) and carefully spray your shirt – you can spray the whole thing or just a few centimeters around each object depending on what you want your finish image to look like.
5.) Your t-shirt will visibly begin to lighten before your eyes so again leave on the bleach depending on how light you personally want it to go.
6.) Carefully rinse your t-shirt in the basin of water using a stirring stick or rubber gloves.
7.) Hang it up to dry.
8.) You won’t get all the bleach out first go so it’s a good idea to wash the shirt properly and SEPARATELY from other clothes before you wear it.

The designs can be as simple or as complex as you like. Another variation of this is simply to tie dye your t-shirt using bleach – this works similarly except instead of lying out a pattern you pluck the fabric into points, like a hanky and tie rubber bands around these or you can simply roll your shirt up and tie bands around the length of it in intervals to get a stripy look. Remember this works best with darker t-shirts as the color contrast is more definite!

Happy bleaching!
The Results of this Week’s Challenge
Howdy gals and guys! It’s your crazy crafter reporting in!
So doing just that, I have to say that I love this idea. I was bleaching outside in the sun, making a mess and causing water fights AND giving my clothes a cheap face-lift, where’s the negative!

This really is a great craft because even if it goes wrong all its cost you is a 40p bottle of beach and an old t-shirt that you were going to dump anyway and as times are tough at the moment why buy new when you can make new!

For my t-shirt, a purple number from Tesco!!! (With shoulder pads – what’s that about?) I drew out a butterfly stencil in my sketch book, cut it out using a Stanley knife that was less than sharp so that bit did take me quite a while and then cut around it with those funky material scissors that chop in zigzags so as not to fray the fabric (I can’t remember what you actually call them!)

I also cut out to strips and used one of my craft paper punchers to decorate those. Having laid these out on my flat t-shirt I also sprinkled some stars on one side and some shells on the other and put some small pebbles on the design to try to make sure it didn’t move – a more patient and professional person would probably use sand paper to make there stencil or buy adhesive spray.

The result as you can see for a first attempt ain’t half bad and the variety of easy designs is endless. I was thinking about trying laying feathers on the shirt of flowers or leaves, bottle caps, tin can pulls anything.

The only problem I encountered was that I didn’t either 1.) Use enough bleach or 2.) Leave the bleach on long enough to have a sharper contrast but that’s trial and error and I will know for next time.

I also tried tie dying a pair of purple 3/4 length trousers and it works – easy just grab bits of material and stick a rubber band (once you have chased the cat plus rubber band round the house that is) around them and soak. Again I didn’t leave the bleach on long enough so it didn’t really work as the colors were too close but you could see the effect that the bands had and how easy it was to achieve.

Many thanks to all of you who are following this challenge.