I'm Dyeing Over Here

My latest costuming adventure has turned into something of a headache, and not only because chemistry was involved.

Testing the dye.  Turns out the wine was mandatory.

So since my last post I have a spent some time plotting out my next costumes because there is a finite amount of time between now (first week of July) and Dragon*Con (first week of September) and realistically this signals the end of the costuming season.  True, if I wanted to start another costume after that point I could use it for Halloween, but since there are no predictable events requiring a costume between November 2016 and September 2017, I can foresee a lull in the costume-making business.  I mean, I could try to plan ahead for next Dragon*Con but a) I don't know what will be relevant next year (after all - they already changed the stupid Star Trek uniforms yet again!) and b) maybe I'll be a different (hopefully smaller) size by then.  So really not useful to plan ahead too far.

With that in mind and given my erratic costume making schedule, I budgeted out two more costumes I could make in time for the convention, which gives them each one month to make.  I decided to try to make a Star Trek costume first because I could wear it to Dragon*Con as well as the premiere of the new movie on July 22nd.  There was also this amazing moment about two weeks ago when I was browsing McCall's patterns online and found out that they not only had a Rey costume pattern from Star Wars, but that the entire site was having a $2 pattern sale.  Um, sounds like destiny to me.  As a bonus, I could wear that costume to the next Star Wars movie premiere if we end up going.

Awesome, so first up is the Star Trek costume that will hopefully be ready by July 23rd.


While the Star Trek reboot is not my favorite series (more of a Voyager girl here), the costumes look blessedly simple to make.  The female costume is a pullover dress with capped raglan sleeves over a black mock turtleneck.  The male costume is just a long sleeved raglan sleeved top with black pants.  The only thing that looked particularly challenging is the accent color they have on the neckline and the arm stitches.  See my source pictures below.  I wanted to make an engineering blue costume and my husband said he would be willing to wear a costume as well if I made it, so I figured if we were both blue it would be even easier.

Carol Marcus in Engineering Blue

Spock in Engineering Blue

Unlike with the Outlander costume, I found suitable patterns for these two pretty quickly (once I figured out that the diagonal sleeve attachment was called a "raglan sleeve") and the patterns were for beginners -- perfect!  I'm using McCall's M7122 for my dress and Simplicity New Look 6404 for my husband's shirt.  Neither require zippers or buttons - hooray!  The hardest part will be altering the necklines to be v-neck instead of rounded and adding the accent color to the neckline and sleeve stitches.

The problem, it turns out, would be finding the right fabric.

After some research, it appears that the "texture" you see on the new Star Trek costumes isn't a texture, but is a screen-printed pattern of the Star Trek Delta symbol.

Screen-printed pattern on official Star Trek uniform

What a slap in the face.  This is pretty much like watermarking your damned uniforms, Star Trek!!  How are we novice Trekkie costumers supposed to make these on our own without spending $500 on your officially licensed replicas???

Oh.  I see what you did there.

So barring the presumption that I was willing to spend $250 for each of our costume on a replica site like Anovos, I had to find something that at least vaguely resembled the fabric and just hope it looked good from far away with one eye squinted (which is basically my standard for costuming excellence).  I couldn't find anything in stores, and tried to order fabric -- TWICE -- from Fabric.com only to find out the color or the texture was wrong.  I settled on this knit pique fabric because if you squint, the raised pattern calls to mind the delta pattern.  The fabric said "dark blue", but the picture looked more like a teal.  I figured this would be more accurate because most of the source photos of the uniforms look like a dark teal rather than a true blue.  Still, I was pretty disappointed to find the fabric a dull periwinkle thing when it arrived.

Knit pique fabric in light blue, Teal stretch satin for accent color

The pattern looks great, but when you compare it to the source photo it looks way too light.  The stretch satin I got as the accent color looks perfect though.  So it seemed my choices would be to return the patterned fabric and try to find something better, or attempt to dye it to match the color I needed.  Since I'd already struck out twice with ordering online and had been unable to find anything in person, I decided to try my hand at dyeing it.  I mean, how hard could it be?

I did my online research and decided to go with Rit Dye, because I'd heard of them, and also because they gave me instructions for dyeing things in the washing machine.  My husband absolutely was against using any of our kitchen pots for the experiment, lest it tint all our future soups teal.

I did, however, need to do a test swatch on the stove with an old tea kettle we rarely use.  I mixed a tablespoon of Royal Blue and Emerald along with a tablespoon of salt to a pot of hot water.  

I put my test swatch in and held my breath for 15 minutes.  (Mostly because I was downing the above pictured wine out of nerves).

Dog helper

After 15 minutes, I took out the swatch and things were looking good.

Test Swatch looking pretty good

It seemed way too dark, but the instructions warned me that the fabric would appear darker while wet and not to worry about it.  Anything darker than the periwinkle would be an improvement in my book, so I decided to go ahead with the washing machine experiment, this time adding more green than blue so that it would be a bit teal-er.

The fabric brewing in its teal Jacuzzi

As the instructions said, I washed and dried the fabric first, then soaked it in hot water, then added it to my dye bath waiting in the washing machine.  I put it on the wash cycle and reset the machine every 10 minutes so that it would keep agitating the fabric in the water without getting to the rinse cycle, which, you know, would clearly be counterproductive.

After 30 minutes, I took a peek at the fabric.  Still didn't seem dark enough.  I put it back in for another 30 minutes.  The Rit instructions said that it might take up to an hour, and after the hour was up I let it cycle through as normal, then rinsed it through one more time and let it dry as normal in the dryer.

The end result

If you're thinking, perhaps timidly so as to be polite and partly out of reluctant horror, "Gee, Ashley, that looks kind of like how it was before...."

YOU WOULD BE CORRECT, MY FRIEND.

*headdesk*

It would appear that my dyeing had absolutely zero effect on this fabric, which as far as I'm concerned must be made of effing Adamantium.  Yes, I (thought I) checked the fabric fiber type before I started.  I could have sworn it was a cotton blend.  Yes, I now see that it is 96% polyester and I should have known better than to try to dye it, but apparently love (of Star Trek) is blind.  And I am dumb.  And now I have a whole pile of blue fabric that I can't use and probably can't return since I cut a swatch out of it and ran it through the washing machine three times.  Although, since it looks literally untouched maybe I can try...

So now I'm at a loss.  Do I try to buy another type of fabric?  They make the same fabric in a true blue, a dark red, as well as gold.  I could try to make us Redshirts instead, but if I can't return this fabric it's going to be kind of money sink.

Does anyone have any ideas of what to make with 4 1/2 yards of textured light blue fabric??

Because my head hurts and my heart aches with my own stupidity, I am putting this project on hold for another week.  If you need me, I'll be sobbing into my Star Wars Rey costume plans.