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 Ice-dye round two and exciting announcment

In yesterday's post I showed a behind-the-scenes batch where we applied the dye directly to the shirts as opposed to our usual method. These, however, are not those shirts. The results of those will be up tomorrow! Sorry for the wait, but we have so many shirts being produced these days that it's hard to keep up with them all. As I write this there's a stack of at least 15 pre-washed shirts waiting for their final rinse so that we can model them and get them up into the shop. We also recently took a big batch of shirts over to the Bubblegum Galley here in Vegas, where we're now having our first public brick and mortar shop! While the gallery doesn't have set opening hours, they host a wide variety of classes and events throughout the week and are open during Las Vegas's big monthly art event, First Friday. The Bubblegum gallery is conveniently located in the Arts District and is a short walk or Uber ride (or you could rent a bike!) from where the main First Friday event goes down. We're pretty excited, if you can't tell. 

💎 You are magical! 🌈 We are super excited to announce our first ever brick & mortar pop up shop at @thebubblegumgallery here in the Las Vegas arts district! While they aren't open every day, you can always arrange a visit with the owner or pop in for one of their many classes! They're open on First Friday, too, so don't miss out! . . . . . #710visuals #tiedye #icedye #shop #bubblegumgallery #shop710visuals #lasvegas #artsdistrict #handmade #local #art #artists #magical #pastel #pastelgoth

A post shared by 710Visuals (@710visuals) on Feb 12, 2018 at 5:33pm PST

The gallery is a super cool space full of creepy-cute artwork, jewelry, even taxidermy! Antho was super stoked that he was able to recognise a preserved rabbit's head before reading the label... While I'm not so keen on the taxidermy, myself, I can respect the skill and craft involved in making it and give my props to the artist. We'll be hosting some classes of our own soon, and hope to see you there! You can follow along with the class schedule here on the Eventbrite page. We are super duper excited to be part of a gallery showing and to have 710Visuals out there with a store presence. We love sharing our creations with people, but mostly it's been through Instagram and Facebook or our Etsy shop. This has been great, and I'm so happy you're here on my blog reading this! Tie-dye has been such a joy for us and has truly been the light in the dark for me at some points. Life is hard, and sometimes it can be monotonous or depressingly difficult, but tie-dye will always surprise and delight me with the vibrant colours and infinite folds. Hopefully posts like this can help pass along some of that joy to you, too. For now, here's a behind the scenes peek at how we go about some of our craft at our home studio. 

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: Early 2018 Outdoors Ice-dye

For the last month or so it's been pretty cold by Vegas standards. We don't get nearly as cold as some regions of the country do, as many Vegas natives like to remind their relatives via Facebook when news reports start sounding off about snow out East, but we do still have our cold months. Temperatures in the mid 30s (fahrenheit) at night are about the worst our winters typically deliver, which is evidently just cold enough to prevent our ice-dyes from fully melting. We've been doing a lot of our recent projects indoors, which has worked out pretty well for those especially frigid periods, but the weather is prone towards warming quickly here and we're already getting up into the 70s again! With weather like this it's really hard not to want to be outdoors more often, as our recent camping venture may have hinted at. On the day these items were made it was quite lovely out so I took advantage of the pleasant climate and threw together some ice-dyes. We live within walking distance to a 711 (though the hill is quite steep) so there's ice always available. We could try to make our own but we have severely limited freezer space so I doubt we could ever comfortably make enough ice for more than a shirt or two at a time. No problem, though! I have a pedometer on my phone and have been keeping track of my daily step averages for ages now so I can't gripe too loudly about an opportunity to up my step count and work on my butt. Those inclines are great for your glutes, guys, so don't be scared to tackle some hills! I'm always doing stretches and squats at work, too, because I'm a giantess who's on her feet most of the day and a lot of the product in the store I work at is kept in cabinets below my knees or high up where I need to sometimes get on my tippy-toes to reach. Use it or lose it and all that, right? I try to stay active, whether it's creating new shirts or walking around. 

We've been cranking out shirts like mad recently, and I'm beyond thrilled with this development. I find most aspects of the process soothing, and love sharing the results with everyone! I'll be sharing more of the finished shirts here soon, so check back for that. For now, enjoy this batch!

More photos below!

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!

Art: Winter ice-dye round three

Yes, yes, we have MORE! 

Trust me dolls, there's likely going to be quite a bit of these over the next year. I'm infatuated with tie-dye and especially ice-dye if you haven't noticed from previous posts over the years (like this one , this one, or this one from 2015, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, or this one through 2016, or even this one from 2017)... tie-dye is magic. Tie-dye is love.  And if there's one thing we've got a crap-ton of in our house it's love! 

Since it's been a bit cold these past couple months we've had to change up our process a little to ensure that the ice actually, you know, melts. It's not been terribly inconvenient though our living space is small and bringing our projects indoors limits our already limited space a bit further as we have to by hyper-vigilant about any potential leaks or spillages. We have a method that works and has worked smoothly for us so far so I'm pretty happy with it for now. An additional bonus is that bringing the projects inside means better lighting and an even easier time satisfying my itch to peek at every possible instance to see if anything new or exciting has revealed itself! Eventually I'll figure out how to do a time lapse. Eventually. 

For now, here's lots of pretty photos!