Tie-dyeing Blue Jeans

I had a couple of pairs of jeans that I wasn't wearing because they had blemishes in strategic locations, as well as some swapped jeans I picked up at the Maker Faire recently. And while I have dozens of tie-dyed shirts that I wear all the time, none of my jeans are (intentionally) tie-dyed. Time to change that.

Color on Color

I often get questions about dyeing garments that aren't white. I've done it a fair amount, but it's a little tricky. You have to remember that the colors are ADDITIVE. So if you start with a yellow shirt and put blue dye on it, you get green. Purple on yellow gives you brown, and so on. Also, the colors you put on may seem a little dull compared to how they would look on white. So it's worth trying, because you can get some interesting effects (blue and purple on a pale blue shirt looks good), but you may not get the results you expect or hope for.

Here, I did a crinkle pattern on a pair of light-blue 100% cotton Levi's (left) and the exact same crinkle pattern on a pair of medium-blue Gloria Vanderbilt partly-spandex stretch Amanda jeans (on the right). I smushed them both up into wrinkly pancakes, along with the shorts below, and I dyed all three pieces side-by-side with the same colors. I actually squirted the dyes on all three pieces with the same strokes of each color.


The Levi's give a much more vibrant and almost crystalline crinkle effect than the Vanderbilt jeans. The lighter original color of the Levi's gives a much better contrast with the dye colors than the darker blue, though I like both. The interesting part, though, is that the colors on the Levi's jeans look much crisper and sharper than on the Vanderbilt jeans. The denim of the Levi's is thicker and much stiffer than the Vanderbilt denim, giving the crinkles more definition. I think the thicker denim also prevents the soda ash from soaking in quite as well into the Levi's, leaving more undyed fibers in the denim (both pairs soaked for the same amount of time), helping the Levi's look a little brighter in the center parts of the crinkles.

The cargo shorts are from Lands' End in the light greyish color they call "light stone". My daughter managed to spill chocolate on them in strategic places almost immediately, so they were definitely in need of revamping with dye. These were the third piece in my crinkled assembly line. The light grey is almost white, but not enough to really brighten the dye colors.


My daughter likes them more now than in the original grey color, of course, and likes the hoodie I did for her while I was at it.

Stripes Front and Back

This is another medium-blue pair of the Vanderbilt jeans (my usual). This one really demonstrates the effect of working with multiple layers of thick, stiff fabric such as this denim.

Since the fabric is so thick, very little dye bleeds through from dyeing the folded piece on one side, so it's easy to get thick-and-thin effects on the stripes by dyeing a little less or more on the two sides of the folded piece, and it's hard to get dye all the way to the center of the pleats. In this pair, I folded first down the center of the jeans so the back is on the inside, then I pleated the whole thing starting up from the ankles. I like the multi-thickness effect, though.


Here is how they look on (and one of my current favorite shirts--bright enough to hurt the eyeballs!).


And the back...I like the two-toned effect on the legs here (mine, not Lacey's).


A Few Bonus Shirts

I dyed a few shirts for my daughters while I was at it. The third shirt from the left was twisted up like a hank of yarn and then dyed in stripes across it. The shirt on the right was a spiral started near the right shoulder.


Lacey Is at It Again

Such a big help!


My squeaky toy!

Tie-Dyeing the Bookcases

Now that my older daughter is on summer vacation (though she still has homework to do), she has a bit more available time. It's time to do some rearranging in her room to make it easier for her to store and find all her stuff going forward.

Bookcases with Glass Doors and a Little Inspiration

We bought her two Billy 79.5-inch tall, 31.5-inch wide bookcases, along with two pairs of coordinating half-height (37.75-inch high) Billy Morebo glass/aluminum doors. IKEA mentions on its website, and displays in the showroom, that these can be easily personalized by adding wrapping paper, fabric, stickers, etc. between the glass and the backing insert of the door. Just that little hint, and off we go!

My daughter loves blues and greens, and her room is already decorated in those. She's excited about getting her glass doors done in blue-and-green tie-dye to match the rest of her room. Guess who had some influence on the color scheme when I tie-dyed the couch?

A while back I got a bunch of IKEA's Sova twin-sized flat sheets (cheap, 100% cotton, and they dye beautifully). Note that the Sova line has since been replaced by the Dvala line, which is still all cotton but a little more expensive. The Slumra line (now the cheapest line) is unsuitable because it is 52% polyester and won't dye well.

I folded a sheet in eighths (which turns out to be the perfect size, just a bit bigger than the door inserts), then tied it in a pattern and dyed it. After dyeing, I cut off half the sheet since we didn't need it. We hemmed it, and now my daughter can use it as a drape for her loft bed or whatever.


I cut out four matching pieces the size of the inserts plus 1.25 inches extra all around.

Here I laid one of the inserts on top of the corresponding fabric piece.


We're using the leftover strips (about 4-6 inches wide) to make scrunchies for hair.

We attached the fabric to the inserts with Scotch tape. We don't care if the back of the door looks a little messy, and the tape just has to hold well enough for us to install the inserts into the glass doors.


We installed the inserts into the glass doors and installed them according to the instructions. Once we got everything put together, it looked like framed posters of some wild graphic art.


That's the extra half sheet draped over a curtain rod on the right side of the picture. Here's how it looks with the doors open:


My daughter kept running around it singing "It's so pretty!" Well worth the cost and effort just for its looks. Now if only it helps her keep her room clean!

More Gratuitous Dog Pictures

Lacey knows when it's time to join the photo shoot. Here she's sitting on the wrapped inserts.

She's even brought her own props!


Who can resist that pose?

Shoe Mania, Part 4: They're Multiplying!

I was so pleased and excited by the results of my first pair of sandals that I immediately started on three more pairs. I had another design that I wanted to make for myself, and of course both of my daughters wanted some too.

Younger Daughter's Pair: Fancy Thong Sandals with Horse Head Conchos

My younger daughter flipped through the "Sandal Making" book and selected a thong style. Of course she wanted a small modification to the style to make it just what she wanted. She wanted a horse head decoration in the middle of the shoe. Tandy had some matched right- and left-facing horse head conchos that were just the thing.

I cut out the bottom soles and heels for her shoes. Her shoe size is about a kids' size 2, and it took about a square foot of saddle skirting leather.




It's easy to make a long oblong slot for a wide strap even if you don't have a big enough punch. Simply punch a second (or third) time, overlapping the ends of the hole, as in the following picture.


The colors and dyeing process were pretty similar to what I did with my first pair. With her pair, however, she wanted the sole to be black. No problem. After dyeing, I cleaned the pieces with Lexol and treated them with carnauba creme (wax). Since I was going to be gluing the straps to the soles, I didn't treat the whole pieces with the wax. I used the tape to show where I didn't need wax.


Fitting her shoes took repeated efforts, since I had to align the toe straps with the conchos and the riveting and make it fit around her foot properly. I did a fair amount of skiving on both the soles and the strap ends for her shoes so she wouldn't have huge lumps where the double layer of straps went under her (lack of) arch (I marked the skived areas with chalk in the picture below). I didn't bother with padding.


For my first pair I had used nails to reinforce the connections between the straps and the soles after I had glued them with Tandy's contact cement. For this new pair, I used rivets and cement. I also skived the straps, shaving off some of the blue and green dyed layers, so they wouldn't have such noticeable edges under the foot.


Next, I glued on the sole, avoiding putting cement on the back strap, which is supposed to slide.


For this pair of sandals, I wanted to try stitching around the edges of the sandals instead of nailing on the sole. The stitching gives a neater, more finished look to the sandals. The first step is to mark a dotted line of dents using an overstitcher that gives 5 stitches per inch.


I then used a Number 51 drill bit (just smaller than 1/16th of an inch) to drill holes through the soles. I was using a hand-held corded drill. It took 40 minutes for me to drill all around the two child-sized sandals, and my hands and arms were aching by the time I finished. Unfortunately, it was hard to drill straight down through the soles, so the bottom line of holes (and the resulting stitch line) wavered quite a bit. I drilled right through the heels as well.


We used two-needle stitching (my daughters both did some). I found helpful information on this on the web, particularly on the Back Room Leather website. I used waxed nylon sewing awl thread from Tandy. The stitching took about three hours.


We tried various methods to smooth the edges of the sole. Here my younger daughter is using sandpaper wrapped around a small block of wood to sand the edges of her sandals. She is using a "lacing pony" to hold the sandal while she works. The sandpaper-around-wood worked, but it was very slow, and it didn't work on parts that curved inward (the arch area). I also used coarse sandpaper cylinders attached to a mandrel on my drill. That worked better.


Once the stitching and trimming steps were done, I dyed the edges black to match the inner sole.

I don't want the shoes to be slippery, and I want to protect the stitching from wear, so I put a layer of SoleTech 3.5 on both the heels and the main part of the soles.

I had learned my lesson from the first pair of sandals, so I cut the SoleTech pieces a bit large and then trimmed them off after gluing the pieces to the sandals.


Here are the finished sandals:


Here is the front view:


I think the horse head conchos were an inspired piece of design on my daughter's part. She gets comments all the time about how cool they are. I hope she doesn't outgrow them in a month, but if she does, I can always make her another pair!

Shoe Mania, Part 3: Sandal Pieces, Unite!

Now that I had dyed and put together the uppers for my sandals, I wanted to add some padding between the soles before I put the soles together. I got some foam rubber meant for insoles that had a tan knit fabric covering on one side (Ortho Sponge Top-Cover ordered from Louis Birns & Sons). I'll get it without the fabric for next time, but this will be fine for now.

I cut out 3/4-length pieces for each foot, plus extra pieces for a second layer at the heel.


First, I glued the heel layer to the sole layer of padding. I also marked where the sandal straps will go relative to the padding.


Since the straps are all supposed to be adjustable, they need to be able to slide across the sole, so I was careful to avoid putting any contact cement where the straps will be. I'm now ready to glue the padding to the upper sole. Note that the extra layer of padding at the heel will butt right up against the strap there.



The fabric side of the foam rubber did not glue well, so it required multiple coats of the contact cement before gluing to the other piece.

Also, once I had it glued together, there wasn't enough leather to form a good bond around the padding. I pulled it back apart, trimmed the padding to be narrower, and glued it back together.


Nailing the Soles

Since I had this romantic vision of shoemakers nailing shoes together, I wanted to try that myself. Finding the right type of nails turned out to be problematic, though, since normal people don't use shoemaker's nails. There are also quite a few different types of shoemaker's nails. The instructions I was following in the "Sandal Making" book just said "Sole Nails", which turns out to be not quite the right terminology.

I ended up getting "wire clinch nails" from Louis Birns. And of course, I needed to learn yet another measurement convention. It seems that for wire clinch nails, the sizes are noted as 4/8, 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, and 8/8, where 8/8 is a nail an inch long, and 4/8 is half an inch. The trick, though, is that the tip of the nail is meant to bend over when it strikes the anvil, thus locking the nail into the leather sole. So an 8/8 nail is meant to secure a sole that is just less than an inch thick.

I used 5/8 for the main sole and 7/8 for the heel. Here you can see that the nails on the sole poke through quite a bit and bend way over--they are too long for this thickness of sole. These nails would really mess up a nice hardwood floor.

If you look closely you can see the U shape of the nails poking out from the soles--not the desired effect.

Non-slip Soling

I got a sheet of SoleTech 3.5 soling material from Louis Birns. This is pretty thin rubbery material with a slight texture to make the soles less slippery.

Here are the SoleTech pieces I cut. I don't plan to have the rubber come up over the point of the shoes, so it is cut short at the toes.


I glued on the SoleTech with more contact cement. I also dyed the edges of the sandals blue and treated them with Lexol and carnauba creme as I did with the upper soles and straps.

Here are the finished sandals. Yay! I've finished my first pair!


Thoughts for Next Time

Nails: The 7/8 wire clinch nails I used around the heels worked fine, but the 5/8 nails I used for the much thinner sole section were too long. This caused them to form raised "U" shapes on the surface of the sole when they bent over, instead of having just the tip bending flat back into the sole.

Bottom sole surfacing: I had some trouble with having the SoleTech sheet peeling off the sandals, particularly where the nails stuck up from the leather sole, causing about a square centimeter of the SoleTech to not adhere well to the leather sole with the contact cement. I had to redo the sole piece for one sandal, partly because I had cut it a little small, and a couple of nails stuck out right at the edge, aggravating the peeling problem. The second time I cut the SoleTech piece a little larger than the sole, and I trimmed off the excess with a knife after gluing. That worked much better. I think trimming the rubber to the sole also helps avoid creating a place where the rubber can catch on something and be pulled off. Later, though, I plan to try some different soling materials. This SoleTech 3.5 is really too thin and fragile for the sandals I'm making, and it's wearing through much too quickly.

Cement: It also seemed that the contact cement wasn't strong enough (except for its smell!) for gluing the rubber to the leather, though it was fine for the leather-to-leather bond. One of the guys at the leather store suggested using multiple coats of the cement on each side before putting them together. I tried multiple coats later, and it helped (though at that later point I was also using the new Barge formula of Tandy's contact cement, which may have worked better, though it smelled even worse than the previous cement).

The Lure of Leather

This is the piece of thick "saddle skirting" leather I used for my soles. It was an entire side before I started cutting it, and it takes up most of my kitchen floor.


Once in a while I get way too much help! Both my younger daughter and Lacey think this is just the place to plop down for a bit...


And, of course, they want some sandals too!

Shoe Mania, Part 2: Strappy Uppers

In my previous sandal-making post, I cut and formed the soles and heels of my new sandals. During the time I was waiting for those to dry, I started working on the uppers of the sandals. I started by preparing the straps.

The buckles I was using required a size #6 hole for the buckle tongues. I thought I'd try to save some time later by preparing the strap ends with holes and points ahead of time, as shown in the picture. It turned out that it made the fitting a little bit harder, so I won't do it that way again. It's easier to make the holes and such later than it is to correctly position the buckle later.

I used a half-inch oblong punch (also known as a bag punch or oval punch) to make the holes for my straps. I had put my foot on the upper sole to mark the hole locations. I find the punches to be kind of slippery and hard to hold, so I put the rubber bands on to improve the grip. It didn't help much, unfortunately.

Here I tried putting the straps in place, and the whole thing is held together with more rubber bands (if I had to be stranded on a desert island, I'd want a big bag of rubber bands with me).

Here is how the straps look from under the upper sole. You can imagine that these fairly thick straps might be a bit uncomfortable to walk on, since you would feel them as lumps through the upper sole.

One way to deal with the lumpy strap problem is suggested in the Sandal Making book: use a scarier-looking version of a man's razor, called a skiver (in this case a "Super Skiver"), to carefully scrape off enough thickness from the upper sole so that the straps nestle into the sole. Depending on the thicknesses of the straps and the sole, this approach varies in its success.

One thing I found is that the skiver takes a lot of practice to use, and it's a bit like using a potato peeler. The amount of material you take off in one swipe depends on the angle of the handle relative to the leather surface. It's really easy to dig right into your leather and cut off more than you intended. On the other hand, if you stay timid, you'll take a lot of time and not get deep enough. Practice, practice, practice.

Another approach, which I didn't do on this pair of sandals (guess what's coming in a future blog), is to skive the upper sole, the lower sole, and the straps. That doesn't work for all cases, though, such as where the straps are adjustable and you may later expose a part of the strap that was initially covered.

Dyeing

The next step is to dye the various pieces before assembly. Similar to how I finished my third belt, I dyed them all with Tandy's Leather Dye, cleaned them with Lexol, and finished them with a layer of Tandy's Carnauba Creme. I dyed the entire length of each strap (both sides) since the adjustable straps will be able to slide through the shoe--I don't know for certain what parts will show, and it may change over time.


Here is how buffing affects the look of the Carnauba Creme. The lower piece in the picture has been buffed with a cloth and is nice and shiny. There are some white flecks of wax on the upper piece.


I couldn't resist putting the shoes back together with the rubber bands to see how they looked at this point:


Hardware

Adding the hardware, the buckles and rivets, was one of the more satisfying stages for me. This is when things started to look really cool and shiny.

Since I hadn't done buckles before, I had to play with getting the size and location of the slot correct on the strap. I tried my half-inch and three-quarter-inch punches, as well as punching two small holes and using a knife to cut out the leather between them (second hole from the right).


The three-quarter-inch punch worked the best for my half-inch sandal buckles.


Here you can see the slot for the buckle and the corresponding holes for the rivet that holds the buckle onto the strap:


Here are the uppers with buckles and rivets, all ready for the final assembly to the lower soles.


To be continued....