Bleach and KS

June 07, 2012

So it seems as though my most recent experience with fabric bleaching to create patterns and/or designs has mostly ended in disaster.

This shirt is actually the highlight of the bunch, and actually the behind of a shirt (I didn't have any empty dark shirts, so I used the back of one.) Aside from this I tried a handkerchief and a couple towels. Apparently bleach doesn't really work on non-cotton fabrics and towels bleed too much to give accurate details.

Not to mention that I used waxed paper from a calender to make the stencils; the bleach not only started making the paper curl, it also practically dissolved it; the stencils breaking apart everywhere. I had to fold the heart to make the stencil perfectly symmetrical and you can see that it fell apart where I had made the fold obviously in the picture. Other stuff I learned was that the waterproof paper wasn't really to an advantage because I was using way too much bleach and it would just pool on the paper and then inevitably roll off in giant droplets ruining the shirt when I had tried to remove the stencils. Like I said before I also used way too much bleach...

You can see where the bleach rolled off the paper and pooled onto the shirt, near the bandage part and the middle part.

I was obviously not expecting good results from the free test but I learned alot; also that I should wear gloves when handling bleach... my hands were very very sore afterwards.