If you were around for “Adventures with Bleach” back in January, you might instantly recognize what’s going on here. If not… let me start off by saying that I thought another Disney trip in September(this time to the Land and not the World) deserved another bleach t-shirt trial. So…before I hopped in a plane for Anaheim… I found a Dumbo design that I liked and enlarged it using blockposters.com.

Unlike my experiment last time with the transparencies, I decided to do things with a more controlled environment this time around. Once the design was taped together, I drew over it with a heat-transfer crayon and then ironed the design onto my Gap t-shirt. Next, I emptied the contents of my bleach pen into a small plastic bottle and placed a Jacquard 1/2 mm stainless steel applicator on the top [purchased here].

This was my new drawing device… much more controlled application in a thinner line than simply using the bleach pen. I went over every line very carefully with my bleach (as seen above), making sure I didn’t miss any lines on the drawing. It only took about 15 minutes to completely dry (in the photo above you can see sections that are dry and those that are still wet), after which time I took the shirt to the shower for a good bleach rinse out. I then washed/dried the shirt solo… and it was ready to go! All of the crayon lines from the transfer washed out… and we all that was left were the bleached out lines!
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Now this shirt might not be as fun and abstract as my castle shirt, but it sure does make the possibility of decorating darker shirts/fabrics a much closer reality than the old method. And I apologize for the lack of a “shirt being worn” photo… but I simply forgot before the belly started pushing outwards!