Thursday, October 13, 2011

my very own bleach pen shirt

My first creation from Pinterest inspiration, the bleach pen shirt. Here's the original:

And here's my spin on it (check out its two-sided-ness!)...


One thing I did differently that worked great was I used my disappearing ink pen to draw the design. I can't find my pen at the moment to see who makes it, but it's a two-sided pen - one side has blue ink that comes off with water. The other side has purple ink that gradually disappears over time (it's air soluable!). I used the blue side to draw my design that I mostly followed when drawing with the bleach pen, but I did adlib some.

Here is the disappearing ink drawing:

I started with a couple concentric circles as guides, traced around random objects found in the room. These circles kept me centered on the side of my shirt (I wanted half the flower on front and half on back). The circles also kept my flower pretty round as I added petals.

And this is what it looked like with the bleach on the shirt. I put a section of newspaper inside my shirt with a piece of parchment paper on top of that before drawing with bleach. After drawing with the bleach pen, I watched it until it got to a pink color that I liked. Oh, you can see the disappearing pen in this picture.

And here you see the shirt a little more opened up so you can see how the flower wraps from front to back. Ta da!

Oh, and you can see here three spots I added to the front of the shirt just below the flower...I was thinking at the time of something a friend told me a while back. She makes jewelry, and she always puts an intentional flaw in her designs like the Amish do when they make quilts. I'm not sure I love my intentional flaw on this shirt, but that's what I was going for when I did it.

This was a fun, quick project. Definitely worth doing again!