Keep Tie-dye Weird

Ugh, how I hate the word.  Tie-dye.  It makes me think of hideous too-bright rainbow swirls and "Keep Austin Weird" emblazoned on an ill-fitting touristy t-shirt.  It's become so mainstream that nothing about them screams particularly weird.  Shops and even other places have assimilated the design into their cultures, and now they're everywhere you look, from football games to truck stops.

But why should I let that make me hate the word tie-dye?  I like some tie dye, and it is as succinct and accurate a description of the process as you could imagine.  You tie something up, then you dye it.  Easy.  Depending on how you tie and how much dye you use and where you put it, you can get infinite variations.  You don't have to use the rainbow swirl, you can make bunch of brown wavy pleats if you so choose.  And the process is fun.  

I've always enjoyed the process more than wearing the finished project, although way back in middle school I made a bandana with these cool dyed strings, so instead of using the strings as resist, they were making the color. At the time, wearing a headscarf was all the rage, so I wore my bandana to school alot.  I even got called to the office for my "gang symbol".  Right.  The gang of hippie tie-dyer kids.  Who regularly got smashed against lockers on our way to ACE classes, or art class, or maybe woodwind rehearsal.  There may even have been some of us in the Extreme Reading elective.  But I'm not sure, since we were merely a loosely formed band of kiddos who were concerned about whether or not we might get caught in the crossfire of a saloon brawl at lunch.  That being said, we were a huge threat to all the even titchier or even dweebier kids, mostly due to our prayers that the thugs would beat them up instead.  I still have that now-faded bandana. 

But I digress.  My point is actually how much I love dyeing things.  Resist-dyeing things.  

Yesterday, I dyed these diapers for my "more diaper mods" project.  My intention was to end up with one color on the inside of the circle and another for the background. 

  

 

My first attempt at dripping dye into the tufts created by the ties was a catastrophe.  The dye got everywhere, including my hands.  I had also tied some big tufts with rubber bands just to see.

 

The next attempt, I was trying to dye the entire thing first and then color the tufts.  It still didn't work well, so I just aimed for a more even dye all over.

For this piece, I wanted more white in the background since I could tell the blue had mixed up pretty dark.  So I crumpled up the cloth in the plastic bag it would sit in, and splashed dye over the top without worrying about getting much on the bottom.

By the time I got to the last piece I had a technique that seemed to work.  I put the green dye in a plate and dipped the tufts into it.  They were close together so it was hard to get them individually but they were also different lengths so I couldn't get them all in at once.  I had to do a couple at a time, which was more time consuming than I'd like without being as neat as I really wanted.  I then overdyed it all blue.   

I like how they all came out, these weird tie-dyes. 

More Diaper Mods

Flats are no longer doing it for me.  They are great in the early days, but getting them folded to just the right length and putting them into the cover just so, and getting it on a baby who is desperately trying to get away... I'm over it.  So my flats need a new purpose.  A diapering purpose so that I don't need to buy any more diapers.  

Initially this project was an attempt to make my flats into fitteds.  But the elastic gathering in the legs was really a hassle.  I made a lovely casing, but it was just too bulky to really snug up with elastic.  Look, it's terrible, right?  We can either blame the number of layers of fabric or the burnt-out-ness of the elastic--I salvaged it from an old, ill-fitting item of clothing.  At least I didn't waste new elastic on this endeavor.

Gathering is not occurring.

So I think I will sidle over into slightly different territory and not worry about the elasticated legs, but make this more like a contour diaper.  We'll see how that works instead.  

I may even try to make different thicknesses of diapers, (maybe somehow labelled with different colored threads to discern which is which) so that they can serve different purposes.  Another twist I'm planning is to dye the outer layer of the diaper (but not the inner) before sewing it for colorful coverless times.

Here's the prototype in the testing stage.  I already have a few modifications planned to make the fit around the legs better. 

Diaper Tabs

What do you do when you have a baby who's too rotund for size large prefolds?  Add tabs!  

For the prototype for the tabbed diapers, I used some old blue plaid flannel.  There wasn't a long enough strip to go entirely across the back of the diaper, so I split it in the middle.  Also I was being cheap thrifty and trying to use up some yellow and green thread that I have too much of.  Yeah, you can really tell this was a first attempt.

The prototype.

For the next set of tabs I opted to use 2 birdseye flats, each cut into thirds, sewn into tubes and then sewn across the top edge of the back of the diaper.  Not only is this spiffier looking, but it gives me the advantage of an extra inch or so of diaper length.  Why take measures to extend width-wise and neglect length, right?  These diapers are definitely a step up from the flannel prototype.  I decided that plain old birdseye just wasn't cool enough, so I dyed them with the Ice dyeing method.

Some of the ice-dyed tabs.

In use.

That worked out so well that I decided to dye another couple of flats to make more tabs.  For these I tried out shibori.  They kinda look like the patterns on the bottom of a pool. 

Shibori tabs.

An additional, unlooked-for advantage of these tabs is that they're considerably easier to get pins through, since they're just two layers of a looser weave.  The advantage of pins over snappis is that pins actually manage to hold the diaper on a mobile baby if you're not using a cover.  Leaving your pins stuck in a bar of soap is a good way to keep them sliding through the diaper easily.  Hmmm...that gives me an idea for another project!  

Baby Moccasins

Here's what I made yesterday.  Once I actually buckled down to do it, this project was fairly fast.  Well it took all day; it wasn't a super concentrated effort, but it all got done in one day.   Might have been even faster had I not done everything 100% by hand.  Could've saved a few minutes by machine stitching the layers of fabric together, but I decided re-threading the machine and winding the bobbin for such a small project was not worth the hassle for me.

 

Soles are of leather from Tandy's remnant pile.  They are stitched to the upper by waxed linen thread, which is, unfortunately, white, due to a serious lack of options around here..  Vamps and heel quarters are made from a double layer of brown bottomweight twill.  Green embroidery thread topstitching for some interest as well as to hold the double layer of fabric together.  Hook and loop closures on both sides of the foot for adjustability and ease of use. I had been imagining snaps, but then I imagined how hard that would be to fit and secure, so I changed my mind about snaps on shoes.

(Ignore the too-small, non-matching pants.)

I think they meet his approval.  Hopefully they'll fit for more than a week, since walking isn't quite on our agenda.  But when it is, I won't have to worry about the hot, sharp ground.  Breathe a sigh of relief.