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…

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Embroider A Pair of Converse For David Bowie's Biggest Fan

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Yep, you can embroider your favorite pair of Converse to create totally custom shoes!

Y’all, this might be the coolest project I’ve ever taken on. This birthday present for my kid who’s David Bowie’s biggest fan and only ever wears black-on-black Converse on her feet may have destroyed all sensation in my right index fingertip (mental note: thimbles put the “fun” in functional fingers!), but it was worth it for how great these shoes turned out.

The process is long and tedious–and awful on your fingers if you don’t wear a thimble!–but it’s also very easy, absolutely suitable for a beginner sewist. Here’s how you can make your own custom pair of Converse!

Materials

To embroider Converse, you will need the following supplies:

• canvas shoes. The canvas material is the important part here, so any canvas shoe will do. I embroidered on a pair of monochrome black Converse high-tops, but I’m also kind of eyeing the grey ones for myself.
• self-adhesive water-soluble embroidery paper. This is often referred to as “stick n’ stitch” paper, because you can stick it down to a surface just like a sticker, and then embroider directly on top of it. When you’re finished, the paper rinses away with water. You can usually print on this paper with an inkjet printer, as well, which is so great for transferring more detailed designs. If you don’t have an inkjet printer but want to make a more elaborate design, you can use regular printer paper instead, but you will have to pick all the bits of paper out of your stitching afterwards, which is a pain.
• embroidery floss and needle. Two strands of embroidery floss is perfect here. Use the sharpest hand-sewing needle you can get, and don’t forget a thimble!

Step 1: Place the template onto the shoe.

This step would have been easier for me if I owned an inkjet printer. For the lightning bolt design, I cut the overall design out of the adhesive paper, then drew on the color blocking details in pen. I tried a few methods for getting the “Rebel Rebel” cross-stitch design onto the Converse, including trying to draw a grid onto the adhesive paper (so time-consuming!) and trying to use the perforations in the adhesive paper as my stitching template (my poor myopic eyes!), but ultimately I just stuck the printer paper with the design printed onto it directly onto the Converse. It doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it gets done!

Step 2: Embroider Converse according to the pattern.

I used a running stitch, backstitch, cross stitch, and satin stitch for this project, with the backstitch being the most useful for the lightning bolt, and the cross stitch the only stitch I used for the “Rebel Rebel.” For the lightning bolt, I outlined each part in the color I wanted it to be using a backstitch. I used a satin stitch to fill the narrow blue and black color blocks, and more back stitching to fill the red lightning bolt.

I would not recommend a satin stitch for the lightning bolt, because the thread has to cover too much area. It’ll sag over time and be very vulnerable to breakage.

Below, you can see how I cross-stitched the “Rebel Rebel” design directly onto the printer paper pattern. I didn’t end up needing the adhesive paper that I’d already placed there, but it doesn’t add bulk to stitch through and it rinses away easily, so I left it:

Step 3: Remove the pattern paper.

To remove the water-soluble adhesive paper, just rinse the canvas under the faucet for a few minutes and it will come away. To remove the printer paper template, first tear away as much as you can, then soak the canvas until the paper is thoroughly waterlogged. That makes it easier to pick away the remaining paper bits under your stitching using tweezers. It will be a LOT easier to do if your pattern isn’t entirely cross-stitch, ugh!

Optionally, you can cover the back of your embroidery with fusible interfacing designed for exactly that, but I decided to leave the back of my stitching as-is. I didn’t put any knots into the floss, instead hiding the ends well inside the layers of canvas and padding, so it shouldn’t be uncomfortable, and I don’t *think* friction will be an issue, either. But the kid comes home from college for the summer in just a couple of weeks, so if it looks like the embroidery floss is becoming worn on the inside, I can always place interfacing down before it becomes a problem. If it happens, I’ll let you know!

David Bowie’s biggest fan LOVES her new kicks, so much so that the beloved bookshelf quilt is now in second place in the category of Favorite Gifts Made By Mom. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that I might like to embroider a Starry Night scene, or a trilobyte, or maybe Stonehenge on my very own pair of Converse!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Here's How To Embellish a Hoodie with Fabric Applique

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Fabric applique is a popular way to embellish sweatshirts and hoodies. Here’s how to do it!

One of my favorite things about sending a kid off to college is adopting their roommates into my circle of people whom I sew for. I love to sew, but I do not personally need an infinite, always-replenishing supply of sewn goods, so it’s a win-win!

Or, in the case of my kid and her two roommates, each of whom I embellished a hoodie with their school’s name in their class colors, a win-win-win-win!

Embellishing a hoodie or sweatshirt with fabric applique can be a fussy project, requiring careful cutting and precise stitching, but otherwise it’s beginner-friendly. If you can sew a straight stitch and a zigzag and you’re feeling especially patient, you can do this!

Here’s how:

Materials

To embellish a hoodie with a fabric applique, you will need:

• sweatshirt or hoodie. Use one you already own, or do what I did and scour your favorite thrift shop over the course of a few weeks until the perfect hoodie reveals itself to you.
• fabric scraps. This is a terrific scrapbusting project, so don’t be afraid to use even your smallest bits.
• lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing. Pellon and Heat n Bond both make essentially identical versions of this.
• design tools. For designing and sizing the letters, you could use stencils or go digital with something like Canva, Photoshop, or Cricut Design Space.
• cutting tools. You’ll need scissors to cut by hand or you can use a cutting tool like Cricut or Sizzix.

Step 1: Design the applique.

I knew what design I wanted for these hoodies, but I wasn’t sure about sizing, so I went old-school and cut out paper templates of the largest features of my design, then placed and arranged them and adjusted them on the hoodies until I found a size and placement that I liked. For this project, the fabric squares that the individual letters will be appliqued to will each be 3″.

After you’ve got your sizing, you can figure out and create templates for your specific fabric applique design. I created mine in Cricut Design Space, picking the font I wanted and then fiddling with each individual letter until it was the exact size I wanted it to be. But you could also do this by hand using paper templates, or by working with a stencil set. There are so many design options!

Step 2: Cut the fabric applique pieces.

I put my Cricut to work for me again on this step, although you could also cut your fabric applique pieces by hand or use a die-cutter.

Whatever method you use, cut one of each fabric applique piece that you’ll need, and cut one of each piece out of lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing, as well. If you cut interfacing with the Cricut, you’ll want to tape it to the mat at the corners, because it doesn’t like to stick to the mat.

If you’re doing something with a lot of prints and fabric combinations, like my applique letters on an applique background, mock up your appliques after you’ve cut them out but before you iron and sew them, just to make sure that everything is the way you like it. I feel like I should have separated the letters by color better on my own project, but I ultimately decided that I didn’t care enough to cut out new letters, lol. But at least by doing a mock-up I had the option!

Step 3: Fuse and stitch any applique pieces together.

My particular project requires that I applique letters to square backgrounds, then applique those squares to the hoodies.

The first step, then, is to get those letters onto their backgrounds! If you, as well, have applique pieces that overlap, do as much of that as possible before you applique them onto your hoodie.

For my project, I ironed each letter to its square, with the interfacing piece I’d cut to match sandwiched in the middle, then I edge-stitched around all raw edges. A zigzag is by far the best stitch to use when attaching fabric applique pieces, but zigzag gets tricky as the applique pieces get smaller, so ultimately I decided to go with just a straight stitch for this project. It will absolutely result in the odd loose thread from those raw edges, but I think that’s an acceptable look for this particular project.

Step 4: Fuse and stitch the applique to the hoodie.

Take all the time you need to place the appliques onto the hoodie exactly where you want them. For me, this meant placing my appliques, then literally leaving it all sitting there until my partner, who’s a graphic designer, could get home from work and double-check them. When it was his turn, he even got out the tape measure to make sure everything was centered and perfect!

When you’re confident that your appliques are perfectly situated, iron them to the hoodie. I was happily ironing away, listening to a podcast, when I suddenly stopped in confusion, stymied about why on earth my appliques weren’t fusing to the hoodie. Was the thrifted hoodie made of some weird fabric that wouldn’t let the fusible interfacing adhere? Yeah, no… I’d actually just forgotten to put the fusible interfacing pieces between the applique and the hoodie.

So don’t forget to do that!

When everything is perfect, stitch these larger appliques to the hoodie exactly the way you stitched any smaller pieces. These 3″ squares would have done great with a zigzag stitch, but I decided it would match better if I used the same straight stitch I’d used on the smaller pieces. I also purposely used thread that wouldn’t blend in with most of the pieces, to highlight the patchwork look.

The finished hoodies turned out just the way I wanted! I love the patchwork look, and my child’s class color represented in a variety of prints. The kid and her buddies had matching, personalized merch to keep them warm on campus this autumn, and in the Spring semester, a younger student joined the friend group, so I got to make another appliqued hoodie in red!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Am My Younger Child's Bespoke Seamstress, and Other Adventures in Parenting College Students

To be fair, serving as my kid's bespoke seamstress is high-key my favorite thing EVER. All I apparently really want with my life is for people to want me to sew things for them.

And the little kid, at least, is happy to oblige!

First, some mending:

I don't know if it's secret sensory issues or just the fact that I raised picky parsnips, but both kids have the absolute worst time trying to find clothes they like. I lecture often on how many pants and shirts, etc., ought to make up a minimum wardrobe, and yet both kids regularly go off to college with half that and then bitch that all their clothes are constantly falling apart.

Like, YEAH, if you're wearing and therefore washing a garment all the time, it's obviously going to wear out more quickly! THIS IS WHY YOUR MOTHER TOLD YOU TO BRING MORE CLOTHES TO SCHOOL!

And don't even get me started about coats. One kid insists that she has not and will not ever find a coat she likes, and pretty much just layers infinite hoodies. In a Philadelphia winter, no less. I've told her that at some point her professors are going to decide that she must be too impoverished to buy herself a coat and take up a collection, and she'll wake up one morning to find that they've put a gift bag with a brand-new coat in it outside her dorm room door. It won't be to her taste, but she'll nevertheless have to wear it until graduation lest she seem ungrateful.

The other kid does have a single coat that she approves of enough to wear--not that it's warm enough for her own Ohio winters, but whatever--but over Winter Break one day I got too close to the kid while she was wearing it, and I was all, "...do you ever wash this thing?"

"Sometimes," she said.

"How?"

"Cold and Delicate, like the label says."

I said, "Yeah... no," and then wrestled it off her. Girl was wearing this thing not only to class every day, but also to the horse barn twice a week and the Humane Society once a week, not to mention on environmental science field trips and throughout all the other horrors of college life. And then she was barely washing it, because the label said she had to treat it fancy!

Like, it's a COAT, Bro. And not even a puffer coat. It can take a little bit of temperature. I soaked it for a day in hot water with a half-cup of Biz stirred in, closed inside my cooler to keep the water hot. I will not describe to you the state of the water when I finally drained it, but it was something. Afterwards, I stuffed it inside a mesh laundry bag and washed it on Warm and Regular with two rinses with my regular laundry detergent, more Biz, a half-cup of ammonia, and a fistful of citric acid in the rinse compartment because I have the hardest water on the planet. 

Let me tell you that this coat was squeaky clean when it got done. Not a whiff of horse or dog or polluted creek to be found! The faux fur was a little stiff after air drying, but after I went over it with a lint rake it was also soft and fluffy again. 

This is your sign to become as obsessed with the r/laundry subreddit as I am.

Along with the mending and the laundry, I actualized the little kid's dream of stitching just the sleeves of a long-sleeved T-shirt inside the sleeves of a short-sleeved T-shirt, so that the kid could get the layered T-shirt look without having to wear layered T-shirts on her body:

*cough, cough* sensory issues *cough*

I thought the stitch lines ended up a little too visible to fool anyone, but the kid said she liked it, so whatever.

My biggest sewing project, though, was for a kid who I don't even know yet!

In the younger kid's first care package of the school year, I sent her and her roommates a set of hoodies that I'd appliqued with their school name in their class colors. I'm VERY chuffed that all the kids seem to love them, and even more chuffed that when I offered to make a similar hoodie for the younger kid's Hell Child (it's a school thing, don't worry about it) in that kid's class colors, the younger kid was super enthusiastic about it.

So I thrifted a hoodie, double-checked the one I'd made for the kid so I could remember how on earth I'd made it--

I've asked the kid several times if the loose threads are an issue, because I'd worried they wouldn't like it, but she says that all the hoodie recipients are super into that look. So yay!

--and then made a red version for the kid's baby red!

I used Heat n' Bond instead of Pellon for this project (I miss you, Joann's!), and although I'm worried it won't wear as well as the Pellon, omg it was SO much easier to apply.

Honestly, I think it turned out even cuter than the blue version, thanks to the matching hoodie color:

And now the kids are back at school for the Spring semester, and I have nobody to sew for but boring old me, sigh. I did impulse buy this giant bow pattern so I can make a giant Valentine's bow that I do not need but will nevertheless decorate my front door with, so that will keep me entertained for a few evenings, I guess.

Spam me with all your ideas for where I can put giant bows!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!