What Look Are You Going For?
I’ve been in a new phase where I am interested in making and customizing clothes for myself. The shirt that I decided to distress was bought at the thrift store for $2.99. When I bought the shirt I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I knew that I was looking for a black shirt with a dominant logo in the middle of it. As I searched the men’s shirt section, I wasn’t finding what I was looking for. The logo I was looking for had to do with animated characters or shows etc. However, I found a shirt that said Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood and I thought it would do for the start of my acid wash projects. I plan on doing much more so this was just a place to start.
This is the shirt that I bought:
First Distress The Shirt
I started by using scissors to distress the shirt. To make cutting the shirt easier I opened up my scissors as far as they would open and held them at an angel. Beginning at the bottom of the shirt with short strokes, then making then bigger where I saw fit made it easier to distress. Make sure you are careful cutting the shirt because the position of the scissors can be dangerous.
I then moved on to the sleeves and made sure to get the edges of them.
The collar was up next. I made the slits in the collar pretty small but I made sure to get the whole collar.
Next Bleach The Shirt
I used bleach and a spray bottle from the dollar store to get my desired look. To be honest I went a little bleach crazy. This was the first shirt that I made so I wasn’t aware how much bleach I was actually putting on. Since the bleach doesn’t show up immediately it’s very easy to go overboard. So, I advise waiting for the bleach to show up on the shirt before adding more.
I started from the bottom of the shirt, just as I did with the slits, and worked my way up. I knew that I wanted the bottom to be full of bleach and the top and sleeves of the shirt to have a sparing amount.
Then, I sprayed the shirt in the mist setting so it could spread everywhere. For the circles/blotches of bleach you see on the shirt, I used the stream/straight line setting on the bottle. This caused a shorter stream of bleach to seep out, which made the desired circles.
This is what my shirt looked like after bleaching it (sorry the picture is a little blurry).
Here is a better picture before rinsing it. You can see that the color is very strong and bright.
Let The Bleach Sit
So, the next step is to think about how bleached you would like the shirt to look. What color are you going for? If it’s a deeper color than you should keep the bleach on for 15-20 minutes. If you want a lighter color then you can leave it on for 5 minutes. I personally wasn’t thinking about the color, so I left mine on for about 3-5 minutes because that was the time it took for me to get to the sink from outside.
Rinse The Acid Wash Shirt
In the next step, you will rinse all of the bleach out of the shirt. PLEASE USE GLOVES. I didn’t and that was a really poor decision. You don’t want to be exposed to that much bleach because it will start to seep into your pores. If you wear gloves you can potentially eliminate this factor.
Here is the shirt after it was rinsed:
Here is the back of the shirt. I used the stream method on the back to get this acid drop look.
The color is noticeably much lighter than before it was bleached because the bleach was not left on very long.
Wash and Dry
Once you think the shirt is rinsed very well you can throw it into the washer and then the dryer.
Here is the finished product:
The shirt is noticeably much lighter than when it was still wet. So, don’t worry if it’s not as potent as you wanted because once it’s washed and dryer it will really show up.
FIN 🙂
I wore this shirt to The Weeknd concert. Here are a few pictures from the night:
I hope you learned something from this post. If you have any questions feel free to comment them done below. If you try out distressing and making an acid wash t-shirt please tag me in your post, I would love to see them!
Thanks for reading!
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Twitter: @NabilaRaine
