Transformer shirt using bleach

Posted by Pavel on June 29, 2008 Leave a comment Go to comments

I’ve always wanted cool t-shirts. The problem was that all the commercial “cool” nerdy shirts had pretty boring (and questionable) content and I had a lot of better ideas! Making my own shirts would be possible, but didn’t have the money/motivation/etc. for screen printing equipment. A few months ago, I stumbled upon a post on the Make blog about DIY shirts using freezer paper as a stenciling method. Awesome!

My friend James had a birthday a few months ago and asked for a nerdy shirt. Not wanting to order a lame shirt for him off some lame website, I decided to make my own. While looking for stencils, I found this post describing a pretty unique approach to custom shirts: bleach!

However, Phelyx recommended that the shirt should be washed then put in a dryer to “beat out” the bleach crystals. I didn’t really like this method because I didn’t feel comfortable having my creation essentially soak in a mild bleach solution in the wash, so I did some further research on how to neutralize the bleach immediately, and settled on using hydrogen peroxide. Sodium thiosulfate (a.k.a. “photographic fixer”) can be used and is readily available in photography supply shops, but I am lazy and hydrogen peroxide is cheap.

I should also mention that I have heard many times before that simply washing something that has been damaged by bleach will not necessarily stop the bleaching process — the fabric may continue to break down due to bleach residue. If the bleach wasn’t completely neutralized, eventually the garment would be in tatters. Therefore, stopping the oxidation process of the bleach was critical. The reaction is as follows:

H2O2 + NaClO ? NaCl + H2O + O2

Disclaimer: Never mix bleach with hydrogen peroxide directly! This will lead to bad bad things! The reaction between bleach and hydrogen peroxide is pretty violent and dangerous! If you decide to use hydrogen peroxide to neutralize the bleach, RINSE THE BLEACH OFF WITH WATER FIRST! The hydrogen peroxide is only used to take care of any stray bleach still stuck in the fabric. Don’t just pour it on!

Gathering the printed pages and taping them together...

Taped the stitched pages together to a large piece of freezer paper. Cutting...

Now the other leg

I had to add a little bridge made of sticky tape to the hand

Whew! Halfway there!

Man, this part was tough. So many tiny pieces! The lower half was a cakewalk compared to this.

All done! This shows the freezer paper alone -- this is what I will actually use for stenciling.

Here I ironed the stencil to the shirt. If your stencil has very small details like this one, it's good to simply set the iron on top of the paper, pick it up, set it down in a different spot, etc. Because the cloth stretches, it's very likely that you'll tear off small details if you slide the iron too much. Notice that I ironed another piece of freezer paper to the *inside* of the shirt. This is to prevent bleed-through and provide rigidity to the shirt.

Adding extra freezer paper to mask off other parts of the shirt is a good idea! I don't want any errant bleaching to happen.

Finished!

A bit closer...

You can see that I got a bit of bleeding around the edges, giving a "halo" effect. This is due to the thinness of the freezer paper and the amount of bleach I had to spray, which saturated the shirt and caused the bleach to soak underneath.

The original stencil I used

(I’m not sure who to give credit to for the original stencil — I found it via Google Images on a message board a while ago. If you made it or know who did, please let me know!)

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