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As a tropical parrot

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:44:00 -0700

As a tropical parrot

I just realized I could dye linen

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 18:24:08 -0700

I just realized I could dye linen

Photo

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:07:00 -0700

Spring Jeans: Muted floral filagree

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 23:03:00 -0700

Item: a pair of boot-cut, white-on-white jeans with embroidery. White House Black Market brand; I snagged them at Amvets Thrift in San Diego.

Idea: I wanted to try a cold, low-water immersion dye. I know my dyes only react with cotton and that the thread was most likely nylon. So I could immersion dye the fabric and the embroidered details would remain white.

Process: I scrunched the jeans in a tupperware, added 7 different dye powder mixes to 1/2 cups of cold water and applied them to the pants in small splashes all over using a plastic syringe. I allowed the dyes to dilute and creep along the fabric for about an hour before I fixed it with hot water and soda ash for another hour or so. Once the pants were fully rinsed and dried I took them in at the seam to make more of a skinny cut instead of the boot-cut. I could have allowed more time for the pants to fix but I wanted to color to be faded/muted so I did not batch overnight.

I had practiced the low-immersion dying last week:

The Orchid Cultivator, in the flesh!

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:16:30 -0800

The Orchid Cultivator, in the flesh!

Inspiration Series #1: The Lepidopterist's Longsweater

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:40:14 -0800

In an effort to hone my skills I have started a series of projects inspired by and created for people I know and love.

The first item in this series was inspired by and created for Alicia. She had recently taken up a hobby of cultivating orchids. And I wanted to create a bright and colorful sweater or jacket that prominently featured orchids. Something that would be suitable for chilly spring mornings or evenings.

I realized right away there was a daunting variety of orchids of every shape and hue, and my first idea was to cover a sweater in an evenly spaced print of every type I could find, so that no orchid was repeated twice. This was my first visualization:

I realized I would have to do some painstaking handwork to make something like this, and also would be mixing the dyes quite a bit more than ever before to get all the variety of hue. I began to think this would be beyond my abilities. I decided I should pick a color theme and limit it to only a few different shades. I think Alicia looks best in either coral or turquoise. I also realized that the orchids had beautiful, abstract patterns in their centers when they were reduced to their outlines and blown up to a large size. For example:

Instead of featuring the full flowers I decided to use oversized segments of the flowers in a more abstracted way. I found a pattern on Burda’s site for a long sweater that I thought would work well for this project, and shopped up two different versions.

I liked the turquoise better. I designed a back for it and then got to work cutting out the pieces and hand-dying them with the orchids. Here’s a piece of the pattern ready to be dyed on my heliodesk:

Here are all the pattern pieces hanging up to dry after the dying:

And here’s the final product:

I’ve asked her to send along a picture of her wearing it. Hopefully I can post that soon.

Mixing alpine prints: Fashion forward or faux pas?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:51:00 -0800

Mixing alpine prints: Fashion forward or faux pas?

Presenting: HELIODESK

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 21:09:00 -0800

Until now my tracing designs onto fabric has been done entirely with the help of a small and dim lightbox. So small and dim it certainly did not deserve a name (not even a “Darling Lumensquare” or “Brother Bulbcrate”. I was getting frustrated with the constant shifting and retaping and repinning of paper and material necessitated by the small working area of the box (no bigger than a standard sheet of paper). So I decided to build myself a light desk.

Step one: buy a glasstop desk. I looked on Craigslist and found one very reasonably priced in Oceanside. And I got to meet a lovely family with the most adorable girl in the whole world. She looked to be about a year and half old and had fire orange hair with a brown headband. She followed us around the whole time, keeping a respectful distant, but interjecting “Oh! Hi!” every minute or so, as if she was constantly delighted and surprised by my renewed presence. But I digress, the desk:

I figured the top part could be a music station for Josh. Then I went to my local home improvement goods store and purchased the following:

I got two 4-bulb fluorescent shop lights, a large oak panel, some nylon rope, a light cover to diffuse the light, and some bulbs. I used my handy-dandy rotary tool I bought for shaping acrylic to punch some holes and suspended the oak panel under the glass top, placing the lights on top. It turned out exactly as I imagined it and so I am DAMN pleased with myself, because things like this rarely do. But without further ado… HELIODESK!

Already claimed by my boyfriend in the name of SCIENCE.

Onesies for one groovy baby

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 19:42:00 -0800

A coworker commissioned some tie dye onesies for a friend’s baby shower (it’s a boy!). I’ve never tie-dyed before but I was up for trying something knew. I looked up a few techniques online and made some samples that night.

A) scrunch B) spiral C) immersion D) twist

I like the immersion the most. I just randomly gathered the fabric and shoved it down into a tupperware and poured the dye over it in places. I probably should have stuck to these four types again because it’s never a good idea to try something new with the final material…. but I did something new ANYWAY.

I did one immersion and one twist. They both turned out quite nicely, I think.

I tried to do one with multiple spirals.

I was pleased with this one too, even though the multiple spirals are not obvious.

And finally, I got really creative with my idea for a broken stripe pattern.

It was an utter failure. The colors I chose were awful together (turquoise and fire engine red?!) I used too much dye and barely any white was preserved. It just looked like the stripes were drunk. I ended up bleaching it out and trying over. The bleaching turned the messy stripes into a much more interesting and pale sea foam green and peach. I bunched the fabric over my finger and tied at the base to create circles, splashing them bright orange. I was much happier with round 2. The bleach unfortunately weakened the fiber and it tore around the fasteners. I has to turn it into an itty-bitty t shirt instead.

Did a friend up like a tiger for Halloweens.

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 13:39:58 -0800

Did a friend up like a tiger for Halloweens.

Leo Moore is a strange bird.

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:34:35 -0700

Leo Moore is a strange bird.

made a flyer for a Ron Paul event. made a business card peeps...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:58:19 -0700

made a flyer for a Ron Paul event.

made a business card peeps could leave around and about.

Constrictor Cropped Tee

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:47:02 -0700

I went to Amvets Thrift store, here in San Diego, and found this crew cut shirt which had apparently ESCAPED FROM THE NINETIES!

It was cheap and I figured I could give it the “beach bum couture” treatment. Here is the concept:

I altered the shirt first. I widened the neck line until it was off-the-shoulder. Then I hemmed the bottom into a descending crop. In the front the hem hits above the belly button. In the back it hits at about the waist.

Then I created a boa snake motif to guide my hand-dyeing. Here’s what I used to map how I would place the snake on the neckline (I wanted it to suggest a snake was wrapped about the shoulders):

Photoshop is wonderful for trying out different versions of a thing before committing with the dyes. I decided on a greenish-yellow color for the snake after trying several color schemes. Here’s the final product:

what colour lipstick are you wearing in that picture gang gang dance

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 20:08:48 -0700

Makeup Forever lipliner 17C

Made up for Gang Gang Dance.

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 19:36:39 -0700

Made up for Gang Gang Dance.

A string of lights + a camera + a lazy Susan + photoshop = a...

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 22:57:00 -0700

A string of lights + a camera + a lazy Susan + photoshop = a fancy fly

Obligatory picture as a geisha in my new robe.

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:31:00 -0700

Obligatory picture as a geisha in my new robe.

Josephina's Technicolor Yukata

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 20:29:00 -0700

Once again I forgot to take a picture of the product before I altered it, but it was a standard looking yukata (like a kimono, but just one thin layer of fabric, intended for informal use.) It looked something like this:

Apparently someone stole it as a souvenir from a hotel resort in Hawaii, as it had a hotel logo on it. I got it at a thrift store for about $3. I’d been using it as a house robe, but once I started dying stuff I thought, “I should make this thing look like a rainbow vomited on it.”

This impulse was affirmed by the fact that the repeating unit of the pattern has six spaces - for the six colors of the rainbow (I don’t count indigo, I think it’s kinda bullshit, since it’s just blue-purple.) My BF was quick to point out all demarcations of the visible spectrum into discreet color categories is arbitrary (thanks, babe.)

It took about 3 weeks to finish, and involved pain-staking, repetitive application. But, boy, was it worth it!

Look at its majesty!

Close up:

Scratched Pants

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 01:26:01 -0700

I bought a pair of mustard jeans at Amvets Thrift Store here in San Diego. Now, normally I wouldn’t buy anything yellow because yellow doesn’t really suit me:

Yellows wash out my olive complexion but I went for it anyway because I had a good feeling. I bought a pair of long (long for me) size 3 jeans:

I bleached and weakened them with sand paper. I wanted them to be scruffy. Now I wish I hadn’t. but I was just experimenting at that phase and had paid barely anything for them, so I try to stay peaceful when i recollect my own impetuousness:

I took a picture of them, uploaded them into photoshop and had myself a brainstorming session. I wanted a big cat print. So I tried a lot of different ideas out and settled on this concept:

I extracted the pattern from a genuine skinned leopard:

I completed the dying over one night on a weekend. I was expecting it to take longer so I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. They are long for me and I could hem them, but I’m not sure if I should keep or sell them. They are kinda fierce…

Bleach Blossom Skirt

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 15:30:53 -0700

I should have taken photos of the skirt before I altered it, but I forgot. OOPS! It won’t happen again. It was a standard above the knee colored denim skirt from Gap that I got second hand at a thrift store. Here’s my attempt to recreate what it looked like:

The skirt is too big for me (It’s a 6, but Gap sizes run big so probably more like an 8) so maybe I can sell it.

The length was an awkward right-above-the-knee so I knew right away I would shorten it. I wanted the project to be quick, relative easy, and replicable. I had also been generally interested in experimenting with deconstructing denim.

I decided to use bleach and hand-applied black dye. Here’s the concept:

I splashed bleach willy-nilly over it, hoping to create a random, rorschach-like pattern. I accentuated the resulting shapes with a thin, black outline. Then I cropped the hem and frayed below the hem.

It’s too big for me to model but maybe I can get someone with a bigger frame than me to try it out. Here’s the finished product: