Bleach!

It's been a while since I came across this technique, so I'm not sure where I first heard about it. Anyways, the idea is to take a piece of cloth and paint or spray bleach onto it, to selectively lighten the fabric. This is so fun and simple that I am having a bleach party next weekend; we will throw bleach EVERYWHERE and create MASSIVE DESTRUCTION. (Perhaps I EXAGGERATE slightly.) It will be MARVELOUS!

I have lots of somewhat-ill-fitting solid-color tank tops from thrift shops, so it was easy to pick out some fabric to play with. Natural fibers, of course, work best as they will absorb the bleach. However, the bleach will weaken it, so go easy. I diluted the bleach a little, so I'd have more time to draw before I rinsed and the designs wouldn't appear gradiented. A while back David and I liberated some sheets of plastic from the Art Museum dumpster, and those make excellent mounts: they provide a stable surface and prevent the bleach from leaching through to the other side.

I set up some newspapers and one tub of bleach, one of water. I needed way less bleach -- you really don't use much at all -- though most of that is water, later cast out because I wanted the solution more concentrated. I didn't end up using the gloves either; I did 5 shirts, and my hands are fine. Those brushes have nylon bristles, which held up fine to the bleach, and they will be dedicated for this specific use.

Shirt on long plastic board, which I could rest on my legs and lean against the table as a sort of easel. This was my experimental shirt: I was still getting the concentration right, so there's kind of a crappy drawing of birds and dinosaurs on it now. My drawing technique also improved dramatically over the hour or so it took to do five of these.

Some crappy nature tableau.

Attempt to recreate the Reclamation logo from Templar, AZ (plus identifiers for Soviet 12). All-cotton shirt; brown dye -> pink. Meh.

About 5% cotton tank: took several applications, but that looks kind of cool anyway.

Mandelbrot set tank. 95% cotton, black dye -> pinkish orange. Came out quite nicely, and got a lot of comments. Etsy?

Balloons! Balloons balloons balloons. There's a UFO on the shoulder. All cotton; very fast color change. Kind of pinkish.

A reference to the excellent VURT, by Jeff Noon. Greenish fabric -> yellow.

After painting each shirt, I ran it under a stream of warm water, which worked fine to get the bleach out. At the end, I ran everything through the washer with no detergent (I'm not sure this matters) and the dryer. The lighting was poor by that time, and so result pics will have to wait until this afternoon.

Some observations:
• Colors: Brown dyes and some blacks tend to go pinkish, while greens come out more yellow. Fabric with a low natural fiber content will come out with a fainter design, but it will match the overall color fairly closely. A black 5% cotton shirt bleached to a subtle medium grey, though it took a few applications for the design to really show up.
• Brushes: Small tips offer great control, but they also hold less bleach, which means less of a feathering problem. Bleach mostly stays where it's put. I've heard of using spray bottles, which might be fun to try, but I don't have the patience/control to cut out stencils.
• Fabric: Ribbed material will leave dark lines in the design, unless you want to bleach the hell out of the fabric. So it goes.

Tea and a blowtorch

Note: Blogger is being a jerkface, so I've put metal-patina photos up on Posterous.

Last week was a good friend's birthday, and I wished to make her something... however, the risk is always making it more of a "you are cool and deserve something unique" thing, rather than "oh look, see what I made". My current solution is to take something I already know they like and tweak it a little. In this case, she's been into rooibos lately, and the local PFC has many excellent tea ingredients in stock (for cheap!). Thus: Rooibos Dream Tea!

Rooibos has a kind of gentle, nutty flavor that is best accentuated with something that cuts the softness; in the past, I've used lemon juice, but I'd rather blend dry flavors. I bought some ingredients that sounded like they'd go well with it: rosehips, hawthorn berries, licorice root, and hibiscsus flowers. It all came to about $5. I first tried hibiscus in tea after having a dream where some friends and I were eating hibiscus flowers, dancing on the moonlit shores of a stream that was lighted from below. Hence, dream tea. The hibiscus imparts a gorgeous, deep red color and delightful tartness to tea, but too much of it is harsh (many commercial teas get this part wrong). Licorice has a strange sweetening effect that comes on as you swallow the infusion, which I find pleasant mostly as a mixer; it doesn't taste like licorice candy. I didn't know beforehand what the rosehips and hawthorn berries would do.

Brewing a little of each ingredient in its own cup, I sampled them along with a mug of the rooibos. The hawthorn berries were disappointing; they imparted almost no flavor (or color). The rosehip brew also didn't taste like much. The licorice was potent and too intense in proportion to the water, and the hibiscus was perfect. I poured some of these last two into the mug of rooibos until I had something delicious, then blended approximately proportionate amounts of raw ingredients, et voilà. A blend to warm the autumn.

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Of course, cold weather also calls for fire. Last Christmas, I came into possession of a butane-powered cordless soldering iron, and since then I've been searching for fuel for it (it came empty). A recent flash of inspiration led me to the local smoke shop (Smoka Hookah), and I spent the afternoon experimenting!

Apparently, since high school FIRST Robotics, I've lost any soldering ability I had. I improved after a couple of tries, but got bored of waiting for the tip on the iron to heat up and cool down. So I took the tip off and took the mini-blowtorch to some scrap copper wire, putting a patina of color on its surface. I'm going to experiment with finishes and see if I can seal the color in. I had an issue with thicker copper losing its color as it cooled down, which seems to not happen if I quench it in water once I've got a pattern I like.

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Finally, I have long sought an online source for free classical sheet music, and now my friend Murphy has introduced me to Musopen! They also have lots of recorded public-domain music for download. <3