My Crafty Crafts

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Striped Onesie Tutorial

I cant wait for my little guy to come but since we've still got a couple of months left, I need to start getting busy making adorable things like this onesie!

I think it would be pretty awesome to come up with a list called "One Hundred Things to do with Onesies." There are so many things! Here's one today.

Supplies needed:

White onesie
Old cereal box
Electric tape
RIT fabric dye
Spritz bottle
Old rags

Step 1: Start with a clean, white onesie. Cut some cardboard from a cereal box and put it inside the onesie to prevent bleeding.

Step 2: Get out your RIT color dye of choice and your little spritz bottle

Step 3: Mix up some dye. I use hot water, a tiny bit of salt, and at least 1/2 of the package. The lighter the color you want, the less dye you use (and vice versa.)

Step 4: Lay your onesie down on an ugly purple rag towel. It is essential that it is purple and ugly. Get your electric tape and start taping your stripes. You could cut your tape different widths to get some variation in your stripes. Leave some hanging over so you can match up the front and back stripes. Make sure to tuck the back snappy part under the cardboard. Try to not imagine your baby as a prison inmate.

Step 5: Start spritzing your onesie until you get it how you like it. You need to do it pretty dark, because RIT dye is not colorfast and it will fade when you wash it. After you get it how you like it, dab the excess dye (sitting on the electric tape) with a rag. The lay it somewhere to dry for a good while.

Step 6: After it's dried, you can sneak a peek at your stripes. Looking good! Put the tape back...don't remove it yet!

Step 7: Flip your onesie over. You can see the cool outline on the towel. Tape the backside, matching up your tape ends, and bringing out the long end with snaps to stripe as well.

Step 8: Spritz again. By the way, these cheap spritzers are annoying to use, once the dye starts running low, you have to open the cap a lot to put the air back in the create the pressure to spritz. Use all your dye. After you can't spritz anymore, you can open up the bottle and drip the rest on the hemming. I think you can try different kinds of bottle, like a small sprayer. Dab the excess...let it dry. And don't remove the cardboard until it's really dry.

Step 9: Once it's completely dry, carefully remove the tape. Taking a hot iron, iron your onesie slowly, to seal in the color. Make sure the steam is up really high. Before you let your baby wear it, wash it in warm water with a tiny bit of detergent (by itself) and tumble dry. I had some leakage in the sleeves, but I think it adds to the character of the onesie. Also, the white isn't completely white, it has blue twinges to it. After I washed it, it was definitely lighter, so I think I might use more dye next time and really spray it good, even maybe doing a couple coats. I looked into dye fixative, but they contain formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen, so I definitely didn't want that anywhere near a baby.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

Cool Shirts

I found this blog, Making the World Cuter and loved this tutorial.

I can not wait to make some shirts for our little man that is coming soon!

Foam Stamps + Bleach = Cool Shirts

I have been wanting to use a bleach pen and make my kids shirts forever, especially since I saw Cheri's cute bleach pen shirts at I am Momma-Hear Me Roar. So I was super excited that my mom had picked up a bleach pen and shirts to decorate for my 5 year old while I was in Portland last week.
I brought them home, and thought about all the ways I could do these, but I wanted mine to be original. But how?
I used to be a scrapbooker, and I still have a BUNCH of stuff.
My husband threatens me on a daily basis to get rid of it, but I know I can make good use of it.
Light bulb!
I have a HUGE collection of foam stamps-they were the perfect fit for my project.

SO I got to work...

Okay-so out of the 4 t-shirts I made-I took a picture of the one that didn't turn out! This gray was just too light, and I didn't let the bleach set long enough to even make a difference-so it came out of the wash looking like a bleached work shirt, rather than something cool.

SO-use darker colors...or be more patient and let it sit for hours and see what comes of your lighter t-shirts.

On my darker shirts, I only waited like 10 minutes. The parts I used the straight bleach on lightened SUPER fast, and the bleach pen just barely started working which left super cool colors. On the black it left orange/red, on the green it left a blue and on the navy blue shirt it left a kind of pink/orange. LOVE the results!

After you have waited as much as you are going to wait...

After drying, let your super cute model wear it for you and make a goofy face...

Don't you just LOVE how it turned out?
The other 2 are cool too, but this one is my favorite.
I love the orange dashes from the bleach pen, and the super cool bleach splats.

Here are some things I learned from this...