How to Bleach Your Clothes

Bleaching is a really fast and easy way to embellish a piece of clothing. Jeans, t-shirts, etc.

They make these nifty bleach pens, but you can also use regular liquid bleach OR that sink/countertop gel cleaner. Just make sure it says it has bleach!

When I’m using liquid bleach, I like to dilute it with water… I put full-strength bleach on a shirt once and it ate holes right through the fabric. I usually do a tablespoon of bleach and a tablespoon of water. You can eyeball it. You really don’t need a lot of it.

You can use full strength bleach as long as you’re vigilant. It needs to be rinsed out pretty quickly. Leaving it for any length of time will result in disaster. As soon as you’ve got the amount of bleaching that you want, rinse.Don’t go leaving it overnight or you’ll have more holes than bleaching.

How do you get your design onto the garment? You can stencil with bleach, screenprint, or freehand it. You could draw a design in chalk before you bleach, or just freeball it. The skeleton dress and top shown were both handpainted after sketching the design on with chalk.

You can also drip, spray, splash, or dip. Experiment!
Read more…