Juggling balls (Part 2)

These juggling balls are more time- and labor-intensive than the others, but you end up with a much warmer, more personal final product. They're basically hacky sacks, but for juggling you need 3+.

My first attempt / only complete set so far.

There are various ways of making these; the general idea is that you're making a soft cube, so you need six squares in some configuration, plus some space for the stitches to hold. I use two rectangles of suede for each ball, each 3 squares long (kind of like baseballs). You can also use three rectangles of two each, or two L-shaped pieces of 3 each. Or whatever else your little heart desires. All it really affects is the pattern of the colors.

1 red-orange and 1 sage green for each ball. The balls in my original set are filled with black beans, which produces a very pleasant noise. Now I'm trying to make some with jingly bells inside, which will sound sort of rattly when muted by the stuffing... kind of meh, but it'll provide variation. These are for use in juggling rhythms (I've gotten a bunch further since that video... exciting).

Materials!

I'm using doubled thread to sew the edges together, with about 1/4"-1/2" of edging. As with most needle-and-thread projects, this is sewn inside out, except for an opening, then inverted and finished.

Halfway through...

End of each rectangle attaches to the middle third of the other. Suede is a bit more finicky than the cloth I used before; I had to cut a small triangle from each straight edge where it folded around the corner of the other rectangle.

Flipped...

...and inverted. This is just to show what it should look like - a couple more sides need to be sewn before this can be finished. Not all my projects can be fantastic successes, and I ended up abandoning this ball because the suede was too thick and stiff to invert through the hole I had left, at least without undoing a lot of previous stitching. This also happened because I used smaller rectangles than before, which provides less leeway: 1.5-inch squares (so 5.5" x 2.5" rectangles, including 1/2" of slip), instead of 2-inch squares (7" x 3" rectangles). I didn't want to have to stitch up a whole side from the outside, as my attempts at "pretty stitches" usually produce the following:

These are the stitched-up holes from the first set, after stuffing the stuffing in. (Note on that: put in much more stuffing than you think you need, so that the ball is quite taut. Failure to do so will resort in a loose final product that expresses ennui, rather than exuberance. You want EXUBERANT BALLS.)

I'm happy sticking with these ones, as they are very aesthetically pleasing to me. Each has one rectangle of red-on-blue brocade, and for the other rectangle, they have burgundy suede, iridescent red/black cloth, and the reverse of the brocade (blue on red). Hey kids, patterning is cool. B)

Ugly stitches: EXTREME CLOSEUP

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.