Art: Spring 2018 Tie-dye Round one

March is here already and Spring is starting to sweep into the air, at least here in Vegas. Flowers have been blooming since around mid-February, but cold gusts still blow through the valley from time to time and go about drastically dropping our temperatures with their touch. While we've done some ice dyes outside in recent times most are still being done indoors, at least for now. The bits of warm weather have definitely inspired us in some of our colour choices, though! We've been taking more and more of our photoshoots outdoors and I hope to continue this trend while the weather is on the milder end of this region's spectrum. And all this productivity we've been having... We've burned through several tubs of dye over the last month and are getting some fun new shades soon! Seems appropriate to do an inventory update every season if not sooner, as moods and aesthetics change and our supplies dwindle. We've had several custom orders come in, too which means ordering particular colours and items too, things we might not have otherwise picked up. One thing we're especially looking forward to is adding socks to our inventory, as was requested by a repeat customer. It always makes us so happy to see any of our items sent off to a new home, but it's all the more touching when people like it so much that they come back time and time again. Melts our hearts! 💙💦💖

 This all translates to lots of mail coming and going, and lots of shirts soaking and rinsing, but that's what we like to see! Summer is coming, after all, so it's not a bad idea to start picking out that summer wardrobe! I know I'm excited to deep clean my clothes again and work out how I want my closet for the upcoming hot seasons. It's always so refreshing to stop, re-evaluate, and purge away the unnecessary things holding you back. I like to consider myself something of a minimalist, and with Antho and I dreaming of living out of our van and traveling we're really going to need to reduce the amount of stuff we have. Step by step this is being done, and we've already gone from living in a two-story townhouse with a garage to a studio, so now it's just finding the little things and whittling out the fluff. I find the whole process soothing and love seeing a cluttered space become clean, perhaps my inner Virgo neat-freak coming out. In a small studio such as we're in now it's all the more important to stay on top of it. It's still a work in progress, so I won't bombard you with any clusterf**ked photos of our living space just yet. You're welcome. 😉

For now, enjoy these pretty photos of some of our recent creations and the behind the scenes process!

More photos below~

Art: February 2018 Round up and ice dye round four

With February coming to a close, we'll wrap with another batch of tie-dye rinsing photos to try to take us out on an upbeat colourful note. It's been a busy month despite being a brief 28 days! We set up our first pop-up retail tie-dye spot at the Bubblegum Gallery here in Las Vegas's own Art's District, we've processed several photoshoots and posted lots of new items on the Etsy shop, so very much tie-dye was made, had a commitment ceremony performed by Batman, lost our little buddy Zinni to natural causes, discovered our new favourite neighbourhood pizza joint (they have anchovies! Not every place has anchovies, and one of our first big relationship realisations was when Antho and I both confessed to liking anchovies on our pizza), my hours at my day-job were cut tremendously, threatening our financial stability some and causing me to have to refocus my energies elsewhere after being dedicated to the job for the nearly a year... Overall, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster of a month! In a lot of ways I have to say I'm not terribly worried about having the hours of my day-job cut, as I was able to spend a lot of time with Zinni while he was struggling in his final days and that means a lot to me. We've had most of our pet rats for their entire lives, from their very first squeak to their very last, and while it still hurts so badly to lose any of them I have to say that I'm grateful to have been able to be there for them from start to finish like that. Having a pet is a large responsibility, and whenever I take in an animal I truly hope to be there for them throughout our lives together. Humans typically outlive our animal friends, after all, and I don't think it's fair to shuffle them around from home to home where they might not lead such happy lives...and with rats, there's always that chance someone's going to use them as food for a predatory animal, a fate I'd hate to consider being possible for any of the docile little goofs we've raised. And to think, it all started when we spontaneously agreed to adopt an old rat boy named Pendleton. Anyhow, this post isn't about rats or day-jobs or any of that nonsense, we're here for the PRETTIES!

For the colour!

FOR THE TIE-DYE!

Hoo-RAH!

💖

Until next time, catch you next month!

💕

XOXO,

NAU

Art: February 2018 ice dye round three

Splish splash, ever more tie-dye shirts taking their baths!  It's always fun to try to capture the ephemeral process of dye runoff because the colours bleed away and grow ever fainter as the water rushes off down the drain. It's a colourful process no matter what shades we use, though some colours do have a noticeably longer rinse time. Maybe the dyes are more pigmented and all that pigment just takes ages to dissolve? Or perhaps we just went a little overboard when applying that particular dye powder and it ended up being a larger pile of powder than we anticipated. Whatever the case, there's ample opportunities for me to experiment with my camera and see what fun new angles or moments I can capture of our creation process and sometimes Antho will even jump in and play photographer, which is always great! Each and every one of our shirts is hand dyed by Antho and I, with occasional help from our friends when they want to jump in, and we put a lot of time and effort into the process. 

Beyond the dye process and rinsing, which tend to be rather photogenic and feature heavily here, there's a lot of time spent tying and untying, then sitting around the laundromat waiting for endless rinse cycles to work their magic before waiting around for another hour or two for the dryers... it's a labor of love, though, so even though it can be quite a time consuming endeavour we keep doing it time and time again! We've found that we can space out our tie-dye rinsing trips to the laundromats and do one large batch at a time to save some trips and time, but we rinse our newest ice-dyed (or regular tie-dye sometimes) shirts throughout the week so that they don't soak too long in the spent dye. Having Vanticore added to our family has made the time go by a little more pleasantly, too, as we can retreat to the solitude of our vehicle and relax or run errands between loads of laundry.

 We're happy you're here to share in the whole experiment with us and we hope you enjoy the behind the scenes peek! It's always so colourful, and it's fascinating to see how the different colours play together in the dye process. We've been experimenting with some different methods of applying the dye powder recently, and been fairly pleased with the results. It's not a super radical change, but it's enough of one for us to feel a rejuvenated curiosity and push to explore all the various results available. That's one of the most gratifying things in any creative hobby, though, in my opinion- there's perpetual room to evolve, learn and grow as you practice! The more you practice, the better you get, and the more excited you get to try new things that might have intimidated you before and on and on it goes.  

More photos below...

Art: January 2018 tie-dye round 2

Malcolm Gladwell once said it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice at any craft before one reaches master level proficiency, and while it's been disputed since it's initial publishing, I think it's a reasonable sort of goal-post for anyone seeking to really master their craft. If that's truly the case, though, we're going to be working at this for awhile yet... Though we started tie-dyeing some time in 2015 I'd estimate each individual shirt or fold design works out to roughly 30 minutes of hands-on-time with all the processing time included. I'd say we've hit around 200, maybe 300 hours? We're younglings in that sense, because there's still so much more experimentation to be done! Even though we've made over 400 items now, there's always so much more we could try, and there's always new colours and folds to experiment with! I suppose that could seem intimidating, and at times it has... when your budget is limited and your aspirations grand, it can be frustrating trying to work within the confines of your available funds- but, that too is in and of itself a great learning experience. We have a bounty of colours available to us right now, an amount I might even consider mildly absurd, but as a lover of colour I really can't complain. Every shirt shows a new aspect to a colour that might not have been revealed otherwise, and I sometimes find myself growing especially fond of a particular shade as my reserves of it dwindle to naught. In all honesty, if I'm happy to own 20-some-odd shades to slather on my lips, I can't at all be disappointed at a collection of textile dyes exceeding that! I'm not at all chagrined at having too-many-colour options beyond the logistical need to find a place for them to reside between dye sessions... and, alas, with our rather limited space for the time being I'm scrambling to find a balance between practicality, utility, and sanity. We're getting there with Antho's help, and once we sort and organise our back-log of new creations we'll have more room to work with. 

But the creative impulse is hard to ignore... so here we are.

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.  

Art: Early Ice dye for 2018

Rainbows here, rainbows there, rainbows everywhere! We love making tie-dye and do it as often as we possibly can. It's always fascinating seeing what kind of mad science color combinations we can create! We typically work with ice-dyes, sprinkling dye over the ice so that it hydrates through and deposits pigment as the ice melts, which creates a more space-like watercolour effect. Even using only one or two colors we've been really surprised by the depth of the results! We do experiment, though, and no matter how many times we dye no two shirts (or skirts, shorts, dresses, hoodies, crop tops, etc...) are ever the same.  It's been a lot of fun throughout the journey, and we've been doing tie-dye for fun now since some time in 2015 or maybe even 2014. I can't even pinpoint the exact date, it just happened that we were driving along and Antho suggested doing tie-dye on a whim and we found that we actually, really, thoroughly, deeply, passionately enjoyed doing tie-dye. Of all the things.  It makes sense, I suppose- I've always enjoyed painting, digital and traditional illustration, and most things artsy-fartsy... there was an awkward phase around 4th grade where I found out there were these brightly coloured three-dimensional paints you could use on clothes and went about drawing all sorts of goofy lizards and things onto every clothes item I could...Colour and aesthetics have appealed to me for awhile, and Antho has always been fashion/image conscious, crafty and hands-on so tie-dye has just been kind of a natural fit for us both. We're always learning and growing as we go, though, it's just part of the process. Nothing is perfect in the beginning, and there's an adage that it takes roughly 10,000 hours to become truly skilled at any given craft, whether it's playing a guitar, tie-dye, or aeronautical navigation, so we relentlessly we strive forward in our efforts to create cloth and colour alchemy. The more we try, the more we practice, the better we get after all. This also means more shirts (or skirts, shorts, hoodies, crop tops, tank-tops, etc) we can share with everyone!  We hope to be as inclusive as possible with our size options and though our funds are limited we try to invest in items that will work for all of our fans regardless what size they wear.  We want everyone to be able to taste, or wear, the rainbow in their favourite spectrum. Everyone deserves to feel fabulous!

More photos below!

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!

New purple pink hair 2016/01/20

Well, it was purple...

 by the time of posting this, my hair has long since faded from purple to lavender, silvery-blue to green with pink spots...

le sigh.

I used Manic Panic Hot Hot Pink mixed with their Voodoo Blue and lots of conditioner and got enough to do two rounds of dye, which is good considering how much this has faded since application. I don't wash my hair every day or even every other day- it's only shampoo'd two or three times a week max. Even so, I'm likely going to be bleaching my roots and reapplying my homemade lavender dye again soon. 

Wanna see the before and progress photos? Read below!

Winter Tie-dye 2016-02-05

It's been awhile but now that it's starting to warm up again Antho and I made some tie-dye the other day. I'm quite pleased with the results! I'll be posting them on Etsy in the next few days.

Las Vegas: Brennan's B-day tie-dye shindig 2015-09-2

Antho and I tend to have a colorful cast of friends, so it's always a lot of fun to pool our social resources for collaborative events, and as it so happened, our friend Brennan happened to have a birthday coming up! He's a big fan of tie-dye so when he wanted to spend some time with us on his birthday it was a natural choice! There were four of us altogether with Brennan, Dalton, Antho and I and 6 shirts between us. I also had an old boring towel that I contributed. :) Dalton only wanted to do one shirt as it was his first go at tie-dye, his was the pink and black bull's eye! Isn't it pretty? He did a great job! Brennan also opted to only dye one shirt this time around, too. The boys brought Star Wars Monopoly (YES it's real and it's really fun!) so when the shirts were all tied off and well-saturated we retreated indoors to let them cure overnight. They came out great! 

More photos below!

Project: Spring Dye round 2

We're often doing some sort of colorful project or event, so naturally we love creating tie-dye!

Here's some photos of a batch we did earlier this year.

These puppies will be up in our Storenvy and Etsy soon. :)

If you like what you see, please help support our small business so we can keep bringing you colorful new creations!

Hair: May 29th, 2015 Blonde experiment

    So, it's happened. I made a pretty drastic change and finally took the plunge and lightened my hair. It's the first time I've ever been this fair haired so it's quite a change of pace.

Project: Spring Ice dyes

     So, Antho and I recently tried out ice dyeing for the first time. We've been experimenting with tie-dying fabrics and creating various designs since last summer (which, if you're curious, you can find over on our Storenvy shop) but this was our first experiment with ice dye and I made sure to document the process.

    And seriously, look at this gorgeous shirt Antho made! Isn't it fun?