Bleach Writing!

Yes, yours truly is one of the nerds who has bought a ticket to the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games AND made a tshirt to wear to it. And I rather like how it turned out and it was one of the easiest shirts that I’ve ever made. All you need is a shirt, some bleach, and some creativity.

Here is your mission, should you choose to accept:

1. First you’re going to want to get into clothes that you are okay with being ruined. You are using bleach after all.
2. Get a shirt, any shirt. You just want to have a shirt, probably not made of synthetic material. I made mine with a black Hanes V-Neck which has some cotton in it, I don’t know what else. But as long as it’s not 100% polyester, it should be fine.
3. Now you want to determine your design. I knew I wanted to write, “the Girl on Fire” so I used a piece of chalk to draw on the shirt and determine what I wanted. Chalk will work for any dark shirt, but for a light shirt I would use a light blue colored pencil. Use this for any design you want to make and also use it along with a straight edge to create a straight line to write on if you so wish. If you look at my shirt, I did this successfully with all of the words except for ‘girl’. Use the straight edge. It will keep you from looking like an idiot. I promise. I also recommend putting the shirt on while doing this so you know where the words will fall in relation to your body.
4. So, once you like your design, a piece of cardboard that fits inside your shirt and is big enough to be underneath the area you want your design to be on. Stick the cardboard inside the shirt so that when you put the bleach on the shirt, it won’t bleed through.
5. I recommend doing this outside in the garage or on concrete. And putting newspaper down underneath that. Yeah.
6. Before you put the bleach on the shirt, go ahead and prepare your washing machine. Make sure it’s filled with water and reading to start washing your shirt the moment you’re done and DON’T PUT SOAP IN.
7. Now it’s time to get your bleach. Just pour some in a bowl. Just regular bleach. Wow, hard huh?
8. For a paintbrush, you either have to use one that has totally natural fibers or Q-Tips. Just use Q-Tips. Then you don’t have to worry about ruining a paintbrush. Like I did. The bleach ate the brush part.
9. Okay. Now all you have to do is go over the chalk with the bleach! Just dip the Q-Tip in the bleach and then follow your chalk line. You’ll see the bleach start to work almost immediately. To keep the bleach looking even, you’ll want to work as fast as possible.
10. Once done going over everything, take the cardboard out and put the shirt in the washing machine! Careful not to drip any bleach on anything and don’t shake the shirt. Like I did. I got bleach on my sister’s pants. Oops.
11. But that’s all it is! Just writing in bleach on a shirt and then washing it without soap. Easy huh?

So yeah. That’s how it goes. If you want the little spots like mine, just shake the Q-Tip over the shirt to create splatter paint. Also, if you do a black shirt, the bleached part will look red at first. Like this shirt:

But after you wash it, it will look like this: (I'll add a picture tonight)

So go make your own shirt and then post a picture here! J I wanna see them!