How To Overdye All Your Emo Kid's Clothes Black

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

If you don’t like the color of your T-shirt, overdye it a color that you do like!

Be warned: when you overdye a piece of clothing, you do have to have an appetite for experimentation. There are SOOOO many variables in overdying a piece of clothing, included but not limited to:

• What is the material the item is made from? If it’s thrifted and/or doesn’t have a tag, you may not know for sure.
• What kind of stains/dirt has the item been exposed to? Even with a very good pre-wash, an item might have a hidden stain or unknown type of dirt or adherent that won’t wash out and will react unpredictably with the dye.
• What color is the item? The darker the overdyed color, the more accurate the result to the color you want, but if the original color of your item is anything other than white, that will affect your final result.
• What graphics are already on the item? The materials and colors used for graphics take dye unpredictably.

That being said, if you like a little adventure in your refashioning journey, then overdyeing is a fun, eco-friendly, and often thrifty way to take something you don’t love and turn it into something you do.

To illustrate that, here’s how I overdyed some clothing items for my college-aged daughter using materials purchased entirely from the nearest big-box store. It’s a super accessible process, and the clothes turned out great!

Materials

My kid called my shirt arrangement "the Depop scrunch," lol. Apparently the kids all scrunch in the waists of their shirts when they do their flat lays. 

To overdye your own clothing items, you will need:

• clothing items. Ideally, your items will have the tags so you know their fabric makeup. If not, though, it’s okay–just know the results will be a little more unpredictable. For this project, the items are either definitely cotton or are likely cotton-adjacent.
• dye. For this specific project, I am using 1 bottle of black Rit liquid all-purpose dye per pound of clothing. Note that this is double the amount of this specific dye that I’d need if I were dyeing it a lighter color. Black needs a lot of dye!
• color fixative (optional). For this project, I am using 1/2 cup of Rit ColorStay Dye Fixative per pound of clothing for the non-denim items only. My daughter actually wants the denim to be able to fade a little in the wash over time, but if you want the color to stay super-saturated for denim, too, then this color fixative would also work well on it.
• salt. You need approximately 1 cup of salt per dye pot. Iodized salt is fine.
• dish soap. You need approximately 1 tsp of the dish soap you use for handwashing dishes per dye pot. This breaks the surface tension of the water and encourages even absorption of dye.
• giant pot. Your dye pot should be able to fit 1 pound of clothing with enough room for the clothes to be able to agitate freely. If your pot holds less, you can divide the dye and clothes and do this project in batches.

Note that my specific project here is for cotton clothing. If you want to dye items with a polyester content, check out the manufacturer’s instructions here.

Step 1: Weigh, then wash your clothing items REALLY well.

Before you throw your items in the wash, weigh them on a postal scale. My specific project here is for 1 pound of clothing, because that’s what fits in my pot.

The thing about dyeing fabric is that anything on the fabric–dirt, sure, but also body oils, deodorant, soap residue, minerals from hard water, even oils from your fingertips–can affect how the dye adheres. This is exacerbated when you’re overdyeing, as I’m assuming that you’re overdyeing something that you’ve already been washing and wearing, perhaps something that you’ve thrifted. That’s a lot of history that you don’t know about!

So this is not the time for a quick wash. This is the time for a hot water wash with an excellent detergent that contains lipase but not optical brighteners (thank you, r/laundry!), and multiple rinses with a rinse aid like citric acid that will knock off soap residue and hard water minerals.

If you’re overdyeing immediately afterwards, skip the dryer because your clothing items will need to start off wet anyway.

Step 2: Prep the dye bath.

Into a metal pot, add 1 cup salt and 1 tsp dish soap, then fill the pot with water, leaving enough room for your clothing items.

If your clothing items aren’t already wet, soak them in water and ring them out. Don’t put them in the pot yet, though!

First, put the pot on the stove and heat the water until it’s just about to boil–you should see steam, and maybe just a little movement in the water, but it shouldn’t be boiling.

Shake the whole bottle of Rit dye well, then add to the water. I like to refill the bottle with tap water, shake it up again, and also pour that into the pot just to make sure that I’m getting every speck of dye.

Step 3: Add the clothes to the dye pot and stir.

This is where your real time commitment starts.

The Rit dye instructions recommend a dye bath time of 20 minutes to 1 hour, and since I’m dyeing clothes black, I’m using the longest dye time. Combined with stirring every couple of minutes, it’s a chore!

Especially if you’re going for the full hour, you’ll need to readjust the heat down a few times to keep the temperature just below boiling.

Step 4: Rinse, then color fix.

When the dye time is up, pour out the dye water and rinse the clothing items until the water runs clear.

While you’re doing that, refill the pot with water and heat it on the stove until it’s once again just below boiling.

Add 1/2 cup of Rit Dye ColorStay Dye Fixative to the pot, and stir well.

Wring out the rinsed clothing items, then add them to the pot. This time you only have to keep them in the bath for 20 minutes, but you do have to keep stirring every couple of minutes. It’s still a chore!

Step 5: Rinse again, then wash well.

Pour out the water again, and rinse the clothing items again until the water runs clear.

Wash the clothing items again exactly as you did in Step 1. Optionally, add color catcher sheets to the wash load to absorb excess dye, but the thorough wash should be sufficient.

Dry clothes as normal.

Afterwards, the fun part is seeing how your experiment turned out!

The denim shorts turned out super black and super even. They’re honestly a little darker than my daughter would prefer, since she likes a more faded look, but I skipped the color fixative on these and denim is notorious for fading, so I think it’ll look closer to what she wants after a few washes and wears. I’d already warned her that the thread on these garments likely wouldn’t dye, so that wasn’t an issue.

The long-sleeved shirt was more of a gamble, since I could tell by the feel that it’s not 100% cotton. It actually took the dye great, though… except for a couple of uneven spots, grr. The shirt was originally dark enough grey that the spots could represent stains that weren’t previously visible. Crowding items in the dye pot or insufficient agitation can also cause uneven dyeing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. If the color was very important I’d dye it again, but my daughter says she’ll wear it as-is, so I guess we’ll wait and see if that’s true!

Here is the real winner of my dye pot gamble!

My daughter LOVES how her Bowie T-shirt turned out, and I agree! The lightning bolt is present but more subdued, and the Bowie graphic now looks like a spooky negative. The dye is completely even and a lovely black, and the shirt has been promoted from a pajama top that she wears only around the dorm to one of her favorite everyday T-shirts.

Which is good, because I’m pretty sure that unevenly-dyed long-sleeved T-shirt will end up being demoted to pajama top…

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In Which I Submit To the Dungeon Crawler Carl Universe, Such That I Am Now A Donut Hole

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Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

LITERALLY WHY AM I CRYING?!? This series is about a dude who runs around in boxers and a leather jacket and his ex-girlfriend’s cat on his shoulder! WHY DOES IT HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS?!?

I think I could have held the line against Feelings if I’d stopped at Book 1. Dungeon Crawler Carl was mostly simply fun--in a really fucked up way, I mean. Y’all, that Hoarder Neighborhood Boss thought she’d died and gone to hell because she was a bad person! I was, as they say, appalled.

Interestingly, that scene is set up to reward the reader who isn’t simply rushing through the text to get to the next explosion… as long as they’re not already literate in Spanish, I guess. I can read Spanish if it’s easy, but my older kid can’t, and when we were talking about the book she hadn’t thought that scene was especially affecting, but THEN she admitted that she hadn’t bothered to translate the Spanish, either. When I told her what the Hoarder had been saying, she was all, “Yeah, omg that’s fucked up.”

I also think it’s interesting that the two most messed up scenes in the entire series, that Hoarder one and the goblin baby one, are both in Book 1. At the end of Book 1, and then much more heavy-handedly throughout the rest of the series, we start getting kicked in the teeth by the concept that the NPCs are beings, too, with their own thoughts and feelings and interior worlds, etc., so the idea of horrific violence against them no longer works to elicit even horrified laughter.

I think it takes about that same amount of time for us to realize that Carl isn’t just an action-adventure meathead, and that even though Donut still has her psychotic cat-like tendencies, she’s going to grow emotionally. 

Although--several characters throughout the book call her a child, or child-like, but I don’t feel like that’s an accurate description for how she is, or especially for the relationship between her and Carl. She’s very much exactly as a cat would be if they were suddenly actually a person in a fur suit, and I think that is a major part of why I love this book so much. At its core, Dungeon Crawler Carl is genuinely just a book about a guy who really, really, really loves his cat. And if you, too, have powerfully, aggressively, wholeheartedly loved an animal companion, I feel like you’re going to recognize that and you’re going to get why that’s important. Like, my cat, Spots, is not my baby. She gets on my nerves. She’s spoiled and completely unreasonable. I would also murder an actual human in cold blood to protect her and I doubt I’d even feel bad about it afterwards.

This isn’t my first series in the LitRPG genre, although it’s close--I’ve read the Ready, Player One series, but that’s about it--and I’m definitely not as into the passages about stats and loot boxes and character classes as I could be, although I’ve played my share of DnD so I understand it. And the books where the premise switched to Pokemon or Mario Kart were not as fun as the dungeon fantasy ones. Is the trains premise meant to mimic an RPG genre? Surely not Ticket to Ride, right? Although now that we’re talking about it, a Settlers of Catan book would be SICK!

Carl's Doomsday Scenario by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Carl’s Doomsday Scenario is where the stakes got a lot less like simple fucked-up fun and more like we are torturing these people in such a heartbreaking manner, because it turns out that my meathead Coastie is actually a really good guy who’s had his goodness taken advantage of for too long, and the stuck-up cat brat is actually the pet mom that she herself should have had, and she knows it. Like, genuinely how does the exact same book have me exclaiming both “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GENOCIDE AN ENTIRE PLANET!” and “HEY! IT’S UNETHICAL TO GIVE AWAY YOUR PET!” I mean, both of those sentiments are obvious, it’s just funny that they’re both themes in the same book.

And the sentiment of beating your head against the wall of whatever unfair limit is and always will inevitably be thwarting you, with no hope that it will get better, but still you beat your head against that wall and proclaim that the wall will not break you, you will break that wall--that’s always the human condition, I guess, but it feels especially like the human condition these days.

Walking the tightrope of portraying that the AI/Dungeon has taken the most stereotypical (and therefore demeaning/dehumanizing) elements of human pop culture for the dungeon while also portraying that the creatures embodying these stereotypes are actually whole beings worthy of compassion (and not, you know, of having all their babies bombed to death) got a little wobbly here--I just don’t know if there was a way of depicting the murders of goblin sex workers that would have successfully walked that tightrope--but I think I got what Dinniman was going for. None of the portrayals were as abject as Book 1’s Hoarder Boss or those goblin babies, but I’m still pouring one out for good old GumGum tonight.

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook is the book where it’s probably the easiest to get lost, because not only is there a complicated train system that Dinniman explicitly says you’re not supposed to try to figure out but it’s definitely super weird that you can’t figure it out, but also I’m personally less interested in crafting tables, chats, gems, and just all magical items in general. I did surprisingly enjoy some of the train mob battles, though--very Train to Busan-ish! I got VERY invested in the Katia/Hekla storyline, though--Iceland is so messy!

Also, how many other crawlers do we feel like have been invited to become part of a secret society and just can’t tell anyone?

The Gate of the Feral Gods by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Gate of the Feral Gods makes the switch from Monster of the Week to Big Bad format, which is a little bit of a bummer for me, because if given the choice I will ALWAYS vote for Monster of the Week, and yet my series are ALWAYS trying to Big Bad me! Sam and Dean, I really did want you to just keep fighting wendigos and vampires and ghosts for 16 seasons!

Also, I know I excused the prostitution storyline from Book 2, because I get that the AI/Dungeon Planners are taking the worst/most stereotypical versions of human pop culture as their premise, but Dinniman. Must we have ANOTHER sex worker storyline?!? Two sex worker storylines is too many sex worker storylines. Make Juicebox a regular waitress and stop being weird.

Oh, wait. If you count Samantha that’s three sex worker storylines. Dinniman, you’re starting to reveal too much about your psyche. Like, this is becoming My Dad Wrote a Porno levels of unconscious revelation.

I do appreciate, though, that at least we’re not getting any sex/romance storylines with Carl, thank goodness. Let me enjoy his competence and developing character arc in peace, please! Plus the emotional growth of his platonic life partner, Donut. I’m worried that at some point they ARE going to break him, but until then my favorite thing is watching him craft a complicated plan to save everyone, and then throw bombs at it until it works.

I also remain very worried about Donut’s Constitution.

The Butcher's Masquerade by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Butcher’s Masquerade leans very hard into the discomfort of existing in a universe that is built upon the oppressed as status quo, with bullying evident all the way from top to bottom. This universe is built upon the goal of no matter how low you go, you should always have a dog to kick. And we’re starting to see how some of those dogs are and have been fighting back, and how it’s starting to maybe pay off.

Also, even a Dungeon Crawler universe has lawyers!

Also also... poor Prepotente.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I know for sure that I'm a basic bitch, because Prepotente shrieking out of nowhere will never not be absolutely hilarious to me.

I never played Magic the Gathering or Pokemon, so the premise of this book is a little bit lost on me. But I still haven't figured out what the train game from Book 3 was supposed to be, either--Ticket to Ride? Chutes and Ladders?--so it's fine. My mind definitely skimmed over all the card game rules talk, though, so I'm glad that Donut was paying attention!

It feels really unfair that not only are the aliens trying to kill Carl, but they're also trying to existentially torture him, as well. But at least they've got the excuse of being villains--what on EARTH was up with Bea?!? WHY IS SHE SO CARTOONISHLY EVIL?!? Genuine question: is she a sociopath? She has to be a sociopath. Seriously. Who DOES this?!?

It's interesting, though, that everything revealed about Bea paints Carl as a guy with a good heart who was just floating through life. If he'd ever paid attention to or emotionally invested himself in Bea, there's no way that he wouldn't have noticed all that she was up to. And not to victim blame, but I can't help but feel a little sorry for Bea. Her machinations were absurdly easy to suss out by someone who paid the least bit of attention to her--I mean, the CAT sussed them out!--so how little attention could Carl have been tossing in the direction of his very own live-in girlfriend to not have clocked a single bit of it.

How she didn't try babytrapping him is beyond me!

But anyway, in Book 1, Carl was a video game character. The writing was fine, but he, as a person, didn't have a ton of depth. It's wild that even though this scenario is terrible, this is the most alive he's been since he was a little dude holding his mom's hand and looking out at the Grand Canyon. This is the most love he's given and received. The most family he's had. He's got a devoted platonic life partner who shares his goals and is a true peer and companion. He's got a purpose now. He's passionate. What he's doing is important.

Deep down inside, do we think Carl might be kinda happy here in the dungeon?

This Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our anti-capitalist anti-heroes really come into their own on this level. I kind of wish that the Carl of Level 9 could go back in time so I could see how he'd handle Level 1's Hoarder, or Level 2's GumGum, with his newfound understanding of how this universe works. And I think it would be even sadder, because I don't think he *could* have handled them differently!

Is there meaning in suffering, even when the suffering itself is pointless? It's certainly helped Carl gain a lot of leadership skills, I guess! Seriously, though, I feel like this book does have a lot to say about what it means to suffer, to be a victim. Whether you're a goblin baby or a dungeon crawler or are caught up in Donut's Giant Ball spell or are one of 120,000 children trapped inside Lucia's mind or your cartoon villain girlfriend is monstrously manipulating you and you don't even know it, your experience has meaning, and the meaning of that suffering travels beyond just you.

I also love the through-line of those who strive to help the vulnerable. And not just the already desperate, like those on the surface repeatedly attacking the kinder center, but also Katia, who just wants to comfort a terminally ill baby for the time she has left, and Mordecai, who's one of the few game guides genuinely doing his best. Same for Carl's lawyer. It keeps the vast number of those who are thrilled to victimize the vulnerable from feeling too oppressive.

All that being said, though, I genuinely had no idea what was going on in most of the book. And it was fine. I should have just tossed a bunch of bombs at the plot and I could have been like Carl!

A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sooo... we're doing Mario Kart, I guess.

Also, boo, Capitalism!

The only other thing I have to say is that Carl REALLY should have gotten rid of that one specific pet biscuit...

P.S. View all my reviews

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How To Make a Wooden Bunting

I originally wrote this tutorial for Crafting a Green World.

This wooden bunting can be hung indoors or outdoors.

I hung mine outdoors, where it looks so happy and colorful!

I wanted to make my outdoor space more cheerful, and this wooden bunting, while time-consuming to create, has added a LOT of cheer.

Want a cheerful permanent outdoor decoration of your own? Here’s how to make your own painted wooden bunting!

Materials

There are kind of a lot of supplies at play here, but you can likely scrounge most of them up from your stash.

• wood. The amount of wood and the size will depend on the size of your individual bunting pennants. I chose my pennant size mostly because I had plenty of scrap wood that fit those dimensions.
• primer. I would have liked a spray paint primer for its ease and efficiency, but I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy new primer when I already own perfectly good brush-on primer. I used Zinsser Bulls Eye, which was overkill here, but totally fine.
• paint. Since you’ll be sealing it, almost any type of acrylic paint will work. I used craft acrylics, artist’s acrylics, and indoor house paint–genuinely whatever I had on hand! The sample sizes of indoor housepaint are perfect for this project.
• sealant. Again, anything that you’ve got on hand will work, as long as it works with your paint.
• cording. You can use a natural material if you’re hanging this bunting indoors, but an outdoor bunting will need something sturdier. I used nylon clothesline.
• staples. I knew I’d figure out a reason to buy a staple gun someday, and this was my reason! Excuse me while I wander off to staple EVERYTHING now…
• tools. I used pencil, paper, ruler, saw, paintbrushes, and staple gun.

Step 1: Make a template and trace the bunting pennants onto scrap wood.

I made my bunting pennant template an equilateral triangle for simplicity (but I also think that a scalloped bunting would look SO cute!). I calculated an equilateral triangle with a height matching the width of the largest number of scrap wood pieces that I had, and used that as my template. Because board width varies a bit even on boards ostensibly of the same size, I had to fudge the template with some triangles, but it’s not noticeable in the finished project.

Step 2: Cut the wooden bunting pennants.

Pretend my partner is wearing safety glasses and appropriate footwear, sigh. Also, shout out to my seven-year-old picnic table refinish, and this pic of it that has let me know that today is the perfect day to drag out the pressure washer!

You can of course also make these cuts with a handsaw, and put your fingers in slightly less danger by doing so. Regardless of the tool, though, don’t be a Matt–wear your safety glasses!

Step 3: Prime the pennants.

Hand-painting each pennant on all sides, including the edges, was annoyingly time-consuming, but I got the job done without a single trip to Menard’s, so yay!

Step 4: Paint the pennants.

You could paint these pennants however you like, with fantasy scenes or garden scenes or just polka-dots or other embellishments, but my vision was a single color for every pennant, so that’s what I did!

This part of the project is VERY time-consuming, since every pennant will likely need at least a couple of coats of paint, with drying time in between, and rotation so that all sides can get coated equally. I set this up at a table in my family room and strongly insisted to my partner and two adult children home for the summer that this was a Fun Family Project That We Should All Do Together. Nobody was as enthusiastic as I was, ahem, but everybody chipped in at least a little, and other than one small adventure in which one adult kid managed to find a single tube of oil paint of unknown provenance sneaked into the acrylics and therefore paint a pennant that will essentially never dry, all the pennants got perfectly painted!

Step 5: Seal the pennants.

It took almost a week of chipping away at the project before all the pennants were fully painted, but I managed to seal the whole lot with polyurethane sealant in one afternoon. Choose a sealant that’s rated for outdoor use.

Step 6: Staple the pennants to the cording.

Everybody loves tools, so a couple of my helpers popped back up when it was time to start stapling the pennants to cording. I wanted one long single bunting, so I measured out twelve inches of cording on one end, then stapled the pennants to the cording with a couple of inches between each pennant. 

When we ran out of pennants, I measured another twelve inches at the far end and then cut the cording.

Knot or burn the ends of the nylon cording to keep it from unraveling.

Step 7: Mount the bunting.

Use mounting supplies appropriate to your home’s exterior to mount your bunting. It looks nicest, I think, if a long bunting has several mounting points, so that it’s got lots of lovely looping drapes.

Lol at my partner wearing the exact same paint-splattered basketball shorts and beat-up Crocs on this day. He apparently has a weekend uniform!

Just between us, my brand-new painted wooden bunting is probably just a titch on the gaudy side, but eh, I personally feel like the more colors, the merrier! You could class it up for yourself, though, by limiting the color palette and/or only putting the bunting out seasonally. Which actually gives me the idea of, hear me out… how about a black and orange and purple wooden bunting for Halloween?!? You’d have the most festive front porch in town!

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I Hung a Bunting on the House Because Resale Value is For Losers

But mostly because it brings me JOY!

One of my kids low-key makes fun of my "bunting personality," because I genuinely DO just love a bunting.

I dunno, y'all. They're just so pleasant. And cheerful! And I like making them. And that's all the explanation I feel like is needed.

And that same kid does also give me bunting ideas, so it evens out the mocking.

Anyway, the peace flags that I used to have on the front porch finally rotted away (does that mean that there's peace now orrr...?), and I got the idea to replace them with something that wouldn't decompose like a metaphorical representation of our imminently pre-apocalyptic society, sigh.

And I guess also with something that wouldn't say "PEACE", ahem, but whatever. Y'all know I only hung those peace flags up in the first place because they looked like a bunting.

I didn't want to have to buy anything new for this project, but the beauty of owning too much stuff is that you always have stuff on hand to make other stuff, so my partner in crime cut down quite a lot of our scrap wood (but don't worry--we somehow still have quite a lot of scrap wood!)--

--I primed it--

--and then I snookered the entire family into painting soooo many wooden bunting flags with me:

This was randomly a bigger project than I'd thought it would be (as if every single project I start doesn't turn out to be a bigger project than I thought it would be, ahem), what with the multiple coats and drying time and washing paintbrushes, etc., and the little kid and the partner in crime both noped out near the start, leaving my older daughter/true partner in crime and I to do most of the work--

--but finally I could drag all the flags outside and seal them!

Guess who noped back in when it was time to play with the staple gun, lol. Getting to use the dangerous tools is everybody's favorite part of a project!

Yet another helper noped in when we moved the project out to the yard:

Here's where I started to worry that maybe I should have narrowed my color palette down a little bit...

But it's too late to back out now. When you're nailing something to the house, you have to commit!

And it turns out that I DO like the cacophony of colors, at least for the very specific space that is my front porch:

It's not a space that we use a ton, but somehow, now that it's so much more festive, the grill has migrated over here, too, and we do spend more time enjoying it. And see all that blank expanse of ugly brown siding?

I feel like some painted barn quilt blocks in different sizes would look so nice there. Time to see if I can sneak in just one more family project before the little kid goes back to college!

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