How would you deal with a stubborn stain on your garment? White T shirts that gone a bit yellow, or faded coloured garments?
Why not try colour dyeing?
Resistant Dye, is one of the very creative ways to give clothes a new life or a hippie touch. Tie Dye, is one of the well known resistant dye techniques. It was also one of the highlighted activities in a resort I worked before and was my first experience learning tie dye, learning ways of tying to create different patterns. Through the process, I could see that every piece is unique and you wouldn’t know how it looks like until the material is unwrapped. Besides that, matching different colours also creates a different effect!
Have you done Tie Dye before? Let me flip through some history textbooks and talk you through about it. Tie and dye literally means tying a piece of material then dye it with colour. It’s one of the techniques of the blanket term – resist dyeing, a process of dyeing selected areas of yarns or fabrics by covering up areas intended to remain un-dyed so that they “resist” the dye.
Dyeing your old clothes into a new colour is an upcycling solution. With new colours covering some stubborn stains or redye faded colours, it gives a new life to the clothes and of course you can wear it over and over again.
This leads me to share an event I recently went to. Take a trip with me to London to see this capsule collection launch in conjunction with London Fashion Week (PR Invite). Brought to you by Bad Habits London, a brand created by an American designer Porscha Hill.
First of all, I would like to congrats on the successful launch of ‘Soul of the Past’ capsule collection. This capsule collection that reworked archive pieces from the brand, using natural dyeing techniques and reconstruction, transforming them into other styles or something different from before. The works from this collection doesn’t limit to tie dye
The collection totally shouts circularity from the producer’s end. Most pieces were creatively done by reconstructing them into something different. I have taken some pictures of the hanging tags, showing the story behind the piece, and what it has turned into now. Hence, the pieces are able to wear it differently, style it differently, and most importantly the colours are dyed with natural colours extracted from nature.
I’m totally in love with the purple hues on Porscha’s dress. Also loving the other purple pieces. Porscha drops by every group with her friendly hello and introduction. After chatting with her, I got to know the purple colour is a dye extracted from logwood.
‘Logwood yields deep, rich, red-purples to orchid blues and has been prized as a dyestuff since the 16th century’. Logwood is a tree found in the forests of Central America. According to Bad Habits, dyeing with Logwood is easy and they decided to mix it with Iron to give it a darker feel and improve the lightfastness (a measure of how resistant a colour is to fading, when exposed to light.).
My favourite among all pieces will be the dessert shorts. It looks so cool with the dip dye effect and it can be styled easily during summer especially in this versatile earthy tone!
I felt really glad and honoured to be invited to the event. Thanks to One Twelve Agency. This is a great opportunity for me to see fashion brands that truly cares about people and planet. Besides that, raising circular fashion awareness, showing that it’s achievable with a sprinkle of creativity and innovative ideas!
Do you have other upcycling solutions to share? Drop a comment below and share with the community!
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