Crafturday Project Time - Live Fast and Dye Your Clothes

With apologies to Tish and Snooky of Manic Panic.

I whipped up a couple of those easy-to-do dresses from pre-smocked licensed fabric from the local Fabric Mega Mart for my girls and instead of doing ribbon ties like last time, I decided to make them into the dresses that just layer over a t-shirt. For modesty's sake, the girls wore matching stretch pants underneath.

Unfortunately, my younger child, despite me REALLY taking hers in is so skinny that her dress kept falling down around her waist. I had to find a solution, because I really like this look. I figured that if I got a tshirt and sewed it to the dress with a stretch stitch, it would work out fine. The problem? Where to get coordinating t-shirts/stretch pants for both girls? I checked my local Target because they have great prices on kids' clothing and I get 5% off with my Target Debit Card AND they give a percentage to our school. But woe was me that there wasn't something that really worked well.

Until I remembered that the Target tshirts for girls are super soft, contoured AND take dye like a dream. They are 100% cotton so it just works perfectly. I'd already done this twice before for other projects which I can NOT believe I didn't blog about. Holy cats!

The first was this outfit for my oldest - dyed with Dylon Ocean Blue


Custom lace appliques and beading

The second was the top to a pair of lounging pajamas for my middle child - dyed with Rit dye in Violet

Custom appliques

With both tops I did a bleed effect where the bottom edge was darker than the top. It's harder to tell with the blue top... 

For this project, I wanted coordinating leggings and tops to go with the dresses, so I just dumped the shirt/tights in the vat of dye and let them sit until they were close to the color I wanted.

Ariel dress got the shirt/tights dyed with Dylon's Bahama Blue which gives a light robin's egg hue. Rapunzel dress got the shirt/tights dyed with more of the Rit Violet which as you can see in the photo above gets pretty dark when left to sit for a while. I left the tshirts long inside the dresses to allow for a light barrier/modesty panel and for comfort as well. That faux smocked fabric is ITCHY on the inside and leaves marks.

The best thing about this project was that I already had the dye on hand from past projects so it didn't cost anything extra. The tshirts were $4.99 less 5% (thanks Target!) and the tights were $1.98 for 100% cotton on clearance (plus 5% off again).

Bonus Socks

Bonus socks from the cut offs of the tights. It's a win/win here, folks. And next time I'll actually publish the post on the day in question. This week was a weird one because it was Holy Week and I observed "radio silence" this past weekend on the blog front.