Decorate

Decorating is exactly how it sounds: applying small techniques to change the look of the garment. You can apply these techniques as a way of repairing or covering a stain. All of them are a good way to extend the lifetime of your garment and can be personalised. Decorating can be:

Color them with a new print.
Give them a drawing with textile markers or brush strokes.
Add embroidery stitches.
Print something on top with transfer paper.
Use sewing machine stitches to create a drawing and much more.

A few decorative techniques we like

Shibori & Tie Dye: Instead of fully dyeing your garments, you can use your dye for making prints. This can be done by using the dye options we showed you before, with Shibori techniques or Tie Dye techniques. Both techniques give an interesting print. Shibori is an ancient traditional Japanese technique and later on an African technique, created by folding and clamping two planks in any shape onto the folded fabric or garment but can give different prints by knotting, wrapping and tying. The way you fold, wrap or tie it and the shape you clamp it with, creates different kinds of prints.

Tie-dye: This is derived from the Shibori in the US in the '60s and is a more straightforward and simple technique of twisting and tying. This can be done with Bleach on darker clothes, as a replacement for dye.

Bleach: Using bleach as a replacement for dye is great with techniques like Shibori and Tie-Dye. We know bleach is harmful to the environment, but throwing away a garment still weighs heavier than bleach. Besides this is the only way to give a faded dark coloured shirt a new purpose by changing in colour or print. For your Bleach dye, you will need ⅙ of bleach to ⅚ of water. We used 500 ml of bleach and 2.5l of water. This was enough to bleach jeans. Now there are ways to do it naturally with a lot of sun and lemon. But this will take a lot of time as you need to leave it for months to see some result. Always use gloves and wear an apron or work clothes, that you don’t mind getting stained and enjoy the video Tie-dye with bleach video

Textile markers: This is pretty straight forward. You can buy yourself some markers to draw on a shirt. Make sure to use real textile markers and not the normal ones for paper, because they fade out and might ruin your clothes. The outcome of this technique depends on your drawing skills. Tip: If you are not very good, bring them to a friend who is good at drawing, this will give a much better result! If you do want to give it a try to just quickly cover up that stain, then you watch the video Textile marker cover-up here

Printing: A print on a garment doesn’t always need to be something that we call an all-over-print, but can also be an image or illustration placed in a specific place. This can be done with a Transfer paper or by Silkscreen Printing. Using placement printing can be used as a technique to cover up a stain.

Transfer printing is quite an easy way to do it if you only need one garment printed. You can buy transfer papers and will only need a working printer. Follow the instructions on the package and iron the print onto the garment. As you can see here in this video, where we show you the difference between transfer paper for white clothes and black clothes. Silkscreen printing requires more work up front, but once you have it set up it’s much faster to run a production. For instance by covering up old shirts with new logos.

Embroidery: Another way of decorating your garment is by using Embroidery stitches, of course, this can also be adapted over a rip or a stain and used as a way of repairing. With Embroidery, you can create whatever you want in stitches and create 3D shapes by using wrap stitches and knot stitches. There is a wide variety of embroidery stitches which canbe created by hand and by machine. We like to use the chain stitch, as you can write your initials with it, or to decorate already existing top stitches on a coat.

Fashion

Decorate

Decorate

A few decorative techniques we like

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