activewear collection : dyeing the straps

As a single insignificant person in the fashion industry, finding certain supplies can be difficult. Take, for example, my fruitless search for bra strap elastic (the shiny-on-one-side, plush-matte-on-the-other kind that you have on your bra right now). I could find endless amounts in white and black for retail, but finding colored versions was near impossible (unless, of course, I wanted to order 50,000,000,000 yards - but I am not a manufacturer). Many suppliers of hard-to-find garment supplies don't offer retail sale, so I had to get creative.

Did you know Etsy now has a "supplies" section?

 

I ordered white and used Rit dyes to get the colors I wanted.

 I like to pretend I'm legit by making tech packs for my designs.

The straps dyed very easily - I literally dipped them in the solution (using vinegar as a mordant) for no more than 2 seconds and they were done!

Just waiting on a few more fabric shipments and then it's time to SEW!

dyed roving process

They say it takes a village, and it did. Dyeing this stuff was exhausting, and I never want to smell coffee again. But, it did the trick better than I would have imagined and I couldn't be happier with the results!

On the left: before, white, and after, toffee. At right, a sketch in my notebook with my two fabric swatches.

The process, in a nutshell:

With about 7 pounds of wool, I had to divide this up into multiple batches (probably about 6 by the time I stopped dyeing ... couldn't do it anymore!) Simply, wool is a protein fiber and therefor needs heat and acid for color to take (usually a mordant as well, so it is colorfast, but since this is an "experimental" garment it will never be washed so I skipped this step - but a mordant for wool would be vinegar). I used coffee to dye the wool so I could get a warm, toffee-like color. I brewed about 30 cups of coffee for each batch, and then brought it to a boil and then turned down the heat a bit and submerged the wool, topping it off with a little more water if needed to cover all of it. With wool, you need to be careful about heat and agitation - wool will felt when agitated in hot water, so you "poke" it with a spoon instead to disperse color evenly.

And then I ran out of coffee. I didn't want to use any "nice" coffee (so my dad's sacred cabinet of foreign coffee beans and Starbucks grounds were safe), but at 30 cups per let's say 1/2 pound, that was going to take a lot ... for 7 pounds. Then my dad gets this great idea: to call the local cafe, and ask what they do with their leftover coffee at the end of the day. He called them up and sure enough, they toss it, so we asked if we could have it. I'm pretty sure that's the only time I'll ever enter a restaurant with a beer-brewing sized stock pot. But, they had several gallons worth of coffee to give me and I successfully dyed the rest of my wool.

The fun part however comes after all the wool dyeing. Well, besides the wet wool and coffee smell I had my head in for a few hours. After dyeing wool, you need to rinse it (once cooled, so it doesn't felt) to allow for excess dye to run off. I had to sit in the tub with all my wool (which looked a lot like intestines, it was kind of gross) and squish it around in the water for a good 45 minutes til coffee stopped pouring out of it. The last time I dyed wool, it took around 3 days for it to air-dry, but I didn't have 3 days, so instead I hand-squeezed every last length of it before laying all of it out on a towel-covered drying rack. In the morning it was mostly just damp, so I took a blow dryer to it and wound it all into 7 nice balls of toffee fluff.

At left, "Duck Season" spray paint. Right, a sprayed swatch to match the dyed fibers.

But from here I wasn't really done. I still had to knit the thing. This was like a wrestling match - it took so much effort for each stitch and once the knit piece started getting big (and heavy) it was hard to maneuver around. I also had to tap into my undyed supply of wool to complete it ... which meant I needed to do something about the color change. Spray paint was just about the only thing I could think of, but I wasn't sure how it would work. However, the store had a color that was almost exactly that of my dyed wool, so I bought it and tested it out. It couldn't have matched better. I used it to "melt" the white wool color into the toffee color and make it look like one (which it thankfully does now) and also to add a little color discrepancy for a more organic look. I am very happy with the final result.

Well that's enough for now, our experimental critique begins tomorrow at 8:00 AM and the moment of truth will arrive when I finally get to see it all together! Got shoes for the models today, so everything is ready to go. I will take lots of pictures.

dries van noten spring 2011 rtw

Alright, just got inspired. Look at how they treated the fabric here. We've all seen ombre by now, but this is new.

Guys. They bleached the denim all but for the indigo cuffs. And the waistband. And then for the floral print, the same thing was done. What an innovative way to expand possibilities with fabric. There are several ways to achieve color in a fabric - you can do stock dyeing, where the fibers are dyed before spinning into yarn. Then of course there is yarn dyeing, where the yarn is spun from the fibers and then dyed. You can also do piece dyeing, where the yardage is dyed or individual cut pieces from the yardage are dyed. And finally, garment dyeing, where the finished product is dyed as a whole. This is where this process would have been done - to achieve that "dipped in denim" or "dipped in floral print" look, but it was all done backwards - rather, the whole thing but one little Achilles heel of each garment was dipped in bleach. I may have to try this at home!

And these two have nothing to do with dyeing, but I just love these looks from the show as well.

A little in love with the shoe choice for these two. Overall, a fantastic show, Dries van Noten!