Stylist Saturday: Devin
I really need to get off of the app, TikTok. While I have learned so many hacks, it's been making my screen-time get to a number I never wanted to see and I'm buying too many things. Early in quarantine, I came across bleach dying on TikTok. It's like tie dye but you take an already dyed item and put bleach on it instead. I was LOVING the results and I had to try it myself. I took a couple of my old sweatshirts and tried it and I became instantly addicted! I showed my sisters and they were obsessed too!
My sisters came back home in early July for about a week, so we had plenty of time to figure out what we wanted to do. We ordered a bunch of different colored sweatshirts from Amazon to give it a try. We particularly loved the results on the blue and green options. Depending on what style you choose to bleach, it can be worn for a number of different summertime activities! My sisters and I are all sweatshirt wearers all year long so that's why we chose to do sweatshirts. I wear a sweatshirt mostly during summer nights to protect me from mosquitos. If you choose to dye an oversized t-shirt, that would be perfect to wear to the pool! I included the instructions for this fun activity below! Have fun and look cool!
XO,
Devin
How to bleach-dye:
1. Get a sweatshirt, t-shirt, long sleeve, etc.
2. Lay it out flat on a hard surface.
3. Pinch tightly where you want the middle of the "swirl" to be.
4. Start wrapping the shirt tightly into a circle WHILE pinching the middle. This is to create the "swirl" shape in your garment.
5. Rubber band!!! You can use a minimum of 3 rubber bands to hold the shirt in the shape, but my sisters and I used a good amount of bands, maybe around 10-15
6. Fill a squeeze bottle with 4 parts bleach and 1 part water.
7. Go to a sink where you don't care about getting bleach in places or take it outside and put the bleach on it. We created "pie slices" with the rubber bands and put bleach on every other "slice".
8. Flip it over and do the same on the other side. Use half the bottle of bleach mixture for each side.
9. When done with bleach, put the item into a garbage bag to sit for around 5-10 minutes. This happens very quickly so I suggest hanging around.
10. When you see the bleach working and the color is getting lighter in areas, you can determine when you want to stop the bleaching process.
11. When decided to stop the bleaching process, rinse the item with cold water. You will see the dye start to run and THAT IS NORMAL! Rinse until you don't see any more dye running.
12. Place into washing machine by itself and wash like normal. I suggest using Clorox 2 to brighten the colors.
13. Hang or lay flat to dry!
Below are the results of the two identical blue sweatshirts! The only key difference between the two was the time of exposure to the bleach mixture!
Below had more exposure to the bleach, creating more contrast.
Below had less exposure to bleach mixture.
