Before...
After...
Okay so I recently made some decorative fabric letters which will be up on Sunday because before I put it up I wanted to put up all the the mini diys that went into it.
One of them was using making some distressed hole filled fabric so that's what today's diy is going to be as you probably knew from the before and after's up above.
There were two parts to transforming this fabric, the first was making the holes, the second was dying to add dimension.
So some methods and tips worked for me to seriously distress fabric...
First I find that it helps to cut slits in the fabric with scissors and then make those slits fray.
So one thing that helped to fray and create some distressing was a lemon zester. You basically just "zest" your fabric. This isn't perfect but it did definitely make some difference.
But the thing that worked the best and I don't have a picture for is a razor. This helped fray the fabric, create new holes, and thin the fabric to make it look more distressed. So basically all the shredding in the final product is due to the razor. A couple of things with the razor trick.
1) Make sure you are on a protected work surface that won't get scratched.
2) Use and old razor. This will ruin your razor and you are not going to be able to use this razor afterwards. I used a disposable razor and the handle broke off on mine so please don't use a nice razor.
And another thing that helped distress was washing and drying the fabric over and over and over again. This works because you're just roughing the fabric up will soften the fabric and will cause it to fray. Like that really worn t-shirt that you just love.
Now onto the dying part... (because my fabric was a little gross colored)
So to dye my fabric I was going to use kool-aid but it turned out that my mom had bought a knock off kool aid brand and the blue packet didn't contain blue dye it contained red.
So first how to kool aid dye because I believe it actually works and it's really simple. You basically take a pot that is big enough to hold all of your fabric and then fill it with enough water to cover all of your fabric. Then you add the kool aid packets, I think a rough estimate would be one packet to 2 cups of water but just go with the flow. After you've added the kool aid then you bring the water to a boil and once it's boiling then you turn off the heat, put in your fabric, let it completely cool and then hang your fabric up to dry.
So what I did was a combination of kool aid dye and food coloring dye. I used the same method of the kool aid dye, I just used a whole bunch of food coloring, and it worked.
I actually ended up adding a pack of purple kool aid which worked out pretty well. One thing when kool aid dying is to use unsweetened because if you use sweetened then your fabric will become sticky.
Here is my mixture...
And my fabric soaking...
And the dyed fabric...
One thing to help the kool aid dye is to iron the fabric and my fabric was really wrinkly before so ironing really helped.
