Reverse Dyed Side Fan Fold

Reverse dyeing takes a couple extra steps than just traditional tie dyeing, but I think it’s worth it in the end. I made this shirt at the same time that I made the reverse heart dyed shirt that I posted to YouTube a week ago. So, this too was one of the first shirts that I made using Out White Brite Laundry Whitener. Here’s a link to the YouTube video:

I started by tying a 100% cotton black T-shirt in a side fan fold design using sinew. I didn’t want to fan fold the entire shirt, so I decided to scrunch the main body of the shirt and tie it really tightly with sinew. I was concerned that all of the color would be removed from the scrunched area, but I was pleasantly surprised that I had quite a bit of black left after the color removal process.

Like before, I sprinkled Out White Brite on to the shirt and poured boiling hot water over the top. The Out works so well, that it probably only took about 5 minutes from beginning to end to remove the color.

After I rinsed the shirt, I went ahead and untied the scrunched portion of the shirt before putting it into the washing machine. I left the rest of the shirt tied though. Once the shirt was washed, soaked in a soda ash solution and allowed to dry - I scrunched the untied area of the shirt again and used rubber bands this time to hold the folds in place. I also had a small area of the fan folded portion of the shirt that I had to use some rubber bands on because the sinew came untied.

I already had quite a few blue colors mixed as liquid and so I decided to make an entirely blue shirt. I used Turquoise, Sapphire, Royal Blue and Bluebird from Dharma on the fan folded portion. Then I used Brilliant Blue from Custom Colours over the ice to ice dye the scrunched area.

After processing, rinsing, washing and drying - I love it!