knives & needles: dipped for kawaii

by Yume Ninja-Sovereign | February 23rd, 2011

Attending Sweet Streets & Giant Robot’s “Real Japanese Kawaii” opening gave me the perfect chance to do a little diy. I have meant to cross this off my list for a while now.

Some time ago, I saw this gorgeous thing on Tumblr:

Since credit has been lost on tumblr, please tell me if you know. I’d like to credit the original person properly.

Both Alcuin and I have been itching to try a dip-dye and ombre dying. I mostly envisioned black, rainbow usually reminds me of Nor-Cal hippies of my youth. However, these shorts changed that association forever.

Goodwill hunting gave me these glittered denim shorts ($3USD). I intended to get white, but none were available. These were light blue and glittered.

Onward, to the first trials of dip dying!

What you will need?

A bucket
At least 3 dyes for the rainbow effect. I recommend getting iDYE (not DYLON)
Clothes pins or clips

To start, you’ll need to boil enough water to submerge your clothing item. Since mine were only a pair of shorts, I didn’t need much.

Start off with one of the end colors. I started with yellow (which looked green because of how intense iDYE is).
Submerge the section which you want to be of a certain color, then every 15-20minutes slowly lift up an inch or two (depending on how much of a gradient you want) and clip the clothing. Do that process again until you’ve got the entire section done.

The iDYE was pretty intense, and I only let each section sit for about 10 minutes, so the gradient wasn’t as obvious.

The powder pink was my second and middle color. Because it was lighter than the purple, I submerged the entire bottom part of the shorts. The purple would be able to dye over it.

I also made sure to get some of the yellow section so it would look blended.

Since I wanted the pink to get darker towards the bottom, I slowly lifted and clipped. This time I let each lift sit for about 20 minutes. The Dylon was not as intense as iDYE.

Lastly, I did the same for my purple section. I made sure just to get only a bit of the pink section as the purple was much darker.

I let this sit for about 25 minutes each lift because I realized that the DYLON was definitely not as intense.

I definitely recommend using iDYE (since it comes in smaller packs), or bite the bullet and buy RIT dye.

And VOILA:

This is the result of my hard work.

You can’t see the glitter as well in pictures, but because the denim was originally glitter, the shorts are also glittered.

I think these came out pretty well.

I also decided to do a pair of my tights in an ombre as well due to how well these came out. I only did 1 color though, since my tights were turquoise, I wanted them to fade into purple.