Kind of blue

[kestrell]

Why is it that, no matter how much I prepare ahead of time and how careful I try to be, whenever I do tie-dying I end up looking as if I have eviscerated a Smurf with my bare hands? And yes, I often use gloves and still end up with trickles getting inside the gloves.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I don't know if there's a textile-specific equivalent, but mechanics have a marvelous thick glop they put on their hands before donning gloves. It's called GOOP. It's a chemical, not physical, barrier against oils, solvents, gas, etc. After work one unpeels the gloves, rinses the GOOP off, then washes hands as per normal.

If you can't find GOOP, there's also a class of soaps which have grit swirled into them. LAVA is the one most advertised on TV; there are scores of others. It's not much fun to wash with them, since they sandpaper off the top layer of skin. But if that's all the deeper the dye has seeped, LAVA would be your friend.

[kestrell]

As it turns out, the dye seems to come off with lots of washing and a bath before bedtime. I use Yardley oatmeal soap, which is slightly abrasive but does not give me a rash, which is more than I can say about even most of the "sensitive skin" soaps, including Ivory. But I will keep this recommendation in mind for future efforts.

My tie-dye was more like abstract dying, since I didn't really tie anything except one t-shirt with very tiny folds, which came out fractal-like, so Alexx claimed it. I let the other two items just sit in enough violet dye to cover them, and Alexx described the tank shirt as orchid-like, while the hoodie he described as looking like velvet, with the slight variations of color one gets with the nap. Just in case you were curious about my ongoing dye experiments.

[jesse_the_k]

I was dying to know about them! Dyeing sounds like fun.

I'm all over the orchids, which are one of the few flowers which grace our exceptionally shady lot. We've got some that are deep purple in the center and almost white lavender at the edge, with black and yellow speckles swooping up the center of each petal.

Yeah, if Ivory bites you, GOOP and Lava are completely off the menu.

[kestrell]

I should have anticipated that pun. I'm going to look into napkin folding to get some ideas about flower-like folding for dying. Another thing I do is put some dye in a heavy-duty Ziploc bag and then place the folded item in it and zip it closed; the edges are at the bottom are much darker, and you get these interesting streaks from bottom to top which, according to what color dye you use, could be vines, lightning strikes, whatever, so this might be used to get that effect of streaks in the petal, especially if you were to keep the center part of the item toward the top of the bag so it stays white. Next time I might try to get a Georgia O'Keefe effect if possible.