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: February 2018 Ice dye round one

We're always creating, churning out new designs and experimenting with new techniques and color combinations. Tie-dye has been illuminating for us, and it's become something we do whenever the opportunity avails itself to us. We've really been cranking out an outstanding amount of product these last few months compared to some of the earlier days. This may have something to do with the fact that I've been trying to push towards buying in bulk more so that we have ample back stock ready to experiment with instead of ordering piecemeal one item at a time. Having such an abundance of blank canvases at our disposal stoked something in our creative fires and the results have been great fun! Unfortunately, I'd say our current store inventory is a bit uneven, to say the least, and we're working at expanding our options in all the sizes available so that none of you lovely rainbow-loving folks out there will be left out.  We've made shirts for infants up to 6XL and want to continue branching out! We recently made several 2XL/3XL tee dresses that have been doing really well, so we'll definitely be making more of those for the coming summer months! Plus size girls and boys deserve to feel like the gorgeous beings they are, right? No matter what your clothing size, everyone deserves to feel beautiful and to have options available to them. While searching for plus-size items to add to our shop I've been surprised at the lack of diversity! Trying to find a v-neck shirt alone has been challenging after a certain size, and that's not fair. I'll keep looking because it's our job as creators of clothes to try to ensure we have a little something for everyone, in my humble opinion. 

With some of these shirts, we tried something a little different. Normally we apply the dyes over the ice, letting the melting ice saturate the dye and drip it down onto the top. This creates a more abstract, space-like, water-colour sort of effect that we've enjoyed greatly. For this batch we went dye straight on the fabric, as this can allow a bit more control over the colour distribution. The photos here are just of the process, to see the results of how the dye-direct batch turns out you'll have to check back tomorrow! But for now, enjoy the photos of our tie-dye behind the scenes. 

Art: More January 2018 ice-dye

Another day, another tie-dye. I suppose some people might consider it tedious work by this point, but for us it's a continual process of experimentation and discovery.  There's always new folds, new colour combinations, new alchemy to uncover. No matter how many times we've dyed there's always something new cropping up, some fun new melt, something to uncover. It always seems photogenic, to me, though I guess our viewers might have their opinions about such matters. Both +Antho Jay  and I have been pretty happy with our most recent batches of creations, and as each new batch is a further step in our journey of learning and creating, I like to imagine they keep getting better as we go.  We've been experimenting with applying the dye powder directly to the fabric and then applying the ice recently, in an effort to create more precise colour patterns and lines. We haven't been unhappy with the result- and we've had a couple of items come out that we were really excited about. I'll be posting about the reveal for those when the time comes, but for now please enjoy these photos of our behind the scenes creation process for our tie-dye. We're always trying new colours and techniques and though I've posted about our tie-dye many, many times in the past I can honestly say I don't feel that it's something that will ever become redundant due to the infinite methods for creation and combination available to us.  We recently invested in a big bulk box of shirts so that we could try to create whenever the impulse struck, and I've been very very pleased with the outcome of that. We've been making tie-dye on a nearly daily basis now and trying things we might not have otherwise delved into if we didn't have such a backlog of bounty to experiment with available. While Google might say otherwise, that's their problem. We love making tie-dye and are happy to share it with the world. We hope you enjoy our colourful creations! Plenty more photos will proliferate below, so enjoy the colourful alchemy occurring below. Cheers.

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!