Art: January Tie-dye 2018

Tie-dye, ice-dye, fabric art, textile dyes... it goes by several names depending how pretentious you want to be, but for us it's just good ole' fashioned hippie tie-dye. We've been going through so much ice that our local 711 employees have all started asking what the deal is, curious if we're having some epic party every night that they've not yet been invited to... And we go so often that our buddy Jimmy  has taken to always welcoming us with shouts of "Mister and Misses Tie-Dye!" when we enter the building. I have to admit that I kind of love it, though! I've been talking a lot about our tie-dye these days, probably because we're making some almost every night. If you follow our Instagram you'll have a pretty good idea of some of our various tie-dye shenanigans in real-time but there's also several Twitter accounts, from our official 710Visuals account to my personal account @shethatisnau and  +Antho Jay has his own, too... I try to update the blog steadily and regularly but this is a habit I'm still working on. I've got tons of stuff to share with everyone, though, and my goal for 2018 is to have a post every. single. day!! I missed a couple days in the beginning of January when I was still sick, but since then I've managed to get a post out every day. I'm working on finding my rhythm, getting the writing habit to stick, and figuring out the direction I want my blog to go in the next couple years. Yes, years. I'm at that point now where I want to plan for further and farther out into the future, and tie-dye is playing a large role in that, as is my blogging. While it's all well and good to have a day job to pay the essential bills, I really want to move away from that and get to a point where I'm less reliant on the whims of others for my financial independence. I've been pretty self-reliant over the years with my caricatures and art, but it's always good to have different projects going so that if there's ever a lull in one area you've got something else you can buffer with. If nothing else, we really enjoy making the tie-dye so it's always going to be an enjoyable hobby no matter what else we find ourselves doing.  

July 2017 Summer Tie-Dye Session

Lovecraftian nightmare of a sea creature/alien, or a shirt in the making?

Sometimes it can be hard to tell...

I mean, look at all those nubby limbs in strange and unusual shades melting together, like a band of multicolored worms of unusual size, or especially flambouyant space octopi having an arm-wrestling contest! 

Tie-dye is kind of like a Rorschach test if the inventor had gone to fry parties and listened to records of The Doors in the back of a converted school bus, I suppose. What do you see when you look at the shirts? Some crafters go for more intentional designs, using the fabric to draw things- a face, a bear, an alien, what-have-you. I respect this and know it's not an easy thing to do. When you draw on paper, you're using an almost entirely flat medium (depending on the paper and texture/weight) whereas with fabric you're putting your designs onto an item meant to drape across a human body (or a wall, a bed, so on). You have to be meticulous in your folds and plan ahead, often drafting out your intended results on the fabric beforehand. Then you get to the actual tying part of the process, using either sinew, rubber bands, or sheer force of will to constrain the fabric into those predetermined patterns you've plotted out... Prepare, measure, mix and pour the dye...

This is to say, it's quite a process. Measuring the dye and hydrating it is an art in and of itself- do you mix soda ash into the dye solution or no? How hot do you want the water to be to activate that specific dye to get the exact shade you're hoping for? 

It's a lot of work. And I respect that.

But me?

I like chaos.

A little uncertainty, following an intuition, an impulse. 

I'm not saying I'm a full on anarchist...oh, heavens no. Not this girl. Chaos, without any order, can descend into confusion... Chaos AND confusion?! Nope. I like some planning, and I do ever so love a good steady routine in some areas of my life, when it comes to making art I find I'm a bit sick of precision and planning ahead after years of drawing people for work, I just want to relax a little and make pretty things happen that can be shared with people who want to wear those pretty things. Tie-dye, if nothing else, is an exercise in a patience and delayed gratification, and while there is a time and a place for being meticulous I find I quite like being more abstract and seeing what the dyes and the fabric do without my trying to overthink their interaction. Considering that our Etsy shop is rated 5 stars suggests I might not be the only person who enjoys the end result.  We're certainly not in the top tier of sellers on Etsy by any stretch of the imagination, though, so I know there are things I could be doing differently. All things in time, though. For what started as a one off idea for a date night has turned into a passion that we've been able to share with other people all around the world, and for that I couldn't be more grateful!

With this batch, I wanted to experiment with using gravity to distribute the dyes. We have several containers that we use when we ice dye, and instead of simply tying up the shirt and putting it fully inside the vessel I draped some of it over the sides and under, so that it held itself in place. As the ice melts and the dye is hydrated, it would drip through the center and up/down the sides as they hydrate. This created a really neat effect and I'm super excited to experiment with it more in the future!

More photos after the cut!