This weekend Taylor, Sym and I DIYed some space shirts!

We started with plain black organic cotton t-shirts from American Apparel, in small (for Sym), medium (for me) and large (for Taylor). Sym probably would have been better with an extra small but they didn’t have any in the store but if you buy 3 of the same style you get 15% off. Gotta save that nine dollars!

First we brushed and dripped bleach on them. (we put cardboard inside them to stop it from bleeding through to the backs). Mine is on the left, Taylor’s is in the center and obviously Sym’s is on the right. She used a very light touch with the bleach, I think she just didn’t want to smell it anymore. We let them bleach for a few minutes and then rinsed them out into the washing machine-we did this between each step. It spun them fairly dry so we didn’t have to worry about drying them every time.

Next they went into a dye bath of wine red dye. Sym left for her dad’s right after so I rinsed and hung hers- she’ll finish it today or tomorrow. Taylor and Sym’s went in plain but I tied a couple elastics around mine.

After the dyeing we bleach them a second time- Taylor brushed his again while I went with a straight drip-and-splatter approach.

For the next step I mixed up four batches of dye- scarlet, wine red, royal blue and a purple I cobbled together from the wine red and blue. Again I dripped and Taylor brushed. Afterwards I also added some black to mine to darken up some areas.

After the final rinse we left them to dry overnight and then this morning it was time to add some stars! You can just use acrylic paint for this, but I happened to have some white fabric paint (I bought it years ago for project I never did). To do the star s you just dot the paint on in a random pattern- I also did a couple of lens-flarey ones. To set the fabric paint you can iron it on the reverse, or just toss it into the dryer for 20 minutes or so.

And the finished product! I wore it out today and felt pretty awesome about it. I wasn’t the only one who thought so, as a local street style fashion blogger asked to take our picture.