Discharge dyeing

I found this discharge dye technique online a while back and have been wanting to try it. I tested it on a some scrap fabric and an old t-shirt I had at home and it worked pretty well, so I decided to add it to the collection. I didn’t expect to end up spraying twill tape in my shower at 11:30 pm, but that’s the glamorous life of a fashion designer, I guess.

After the black colour is removed from the warp tape, I’m going to weave solid black tape into as a weft and we’ll see how it looks. Fingers crossed this isn’t a complete disaster as I only have enough discarded twill tape to make one skirt, for now!

Weaving and dyeing… part deux

Last night I spent most of my time spraying the twill tape strips for the hand woven style with a dilute bleach solution.  It takes a while to set so I had to go back several times throughout the evening to repeat the spraying process.  I’m waiting for it to turn a natural off-white clr and am thinking of dip-dyeing the bottom portion of the strands with a contrast clr.  I’m looking for low impact natural dyes.  If I can’t find any, I may just go buy some beets.

What you see in the pics is the tape strands hanging (from my towel rack in my shower) in their original black state, then slowly turning a yellowish clr with the bleach solution.  Eventually it will turn a nice white.