diy wardrobe week project #3

/ staying late at work so snapped a few shots in my office /

today i'm wearing the first dip-dyed item i've created since i tie dyed a shirt at summer camp back in elementary school. it was actually ridiculously easy and i wish i had more things to dye!

/ those balloons are part of my costume for the halloween disco at school, hence staying late /

i bought this dye ages ago when i was going to dye a secondhand dress with some discolouration, only to find out the dress didn't actually fit properly. but i finally found something that was in need of a little sprucing up. i bought this dress at the plaza from one of the heavily discounted clearance sales tables of an already cheap shop. no dressing room, so it was a bit of a gamble, but i'm sure it wasn't more than about $5. you can't see it from the picture, but the dress actually has some pretty ugly sleeves, which i intend to one day remove. but that will have to wait for the sewing machine repair.

in the meantime i thought i would add something a bit extra to this rather drab dress. i now call it my chromatography dress as the colours of the dye have separated out nicely into green, orange and black as they traveled up the skirt. i got this effect by putting the dye in a big bucket, then suspending the dress with just a couple inches of the hem hanging into the dye and leaving it for about an hour. then a quick rinse in cold water and tadaa! i also some fabric scraps in to dye over night, which meant i had little brown kitty paw prints all over my laundry room the next day. if aston weren't already black, i'm pretty sure he would have dyed himself brown!