Simple Shirt Refashion - Dye and Gathers

I hope you all are having a wonderful week so far. My sister is in town from out of state and we had a big(ish) family dinner on Sunday with my parents and all their posterity. There's not a huge number of us yet, but the cousins had a great time playing together so there was a lot of commotion. It feels so good to be living near my family again.

I recently completed another shirt refashion from my stash. This is a shirt I picked up during my Macy's clearance rack raid I talked about in this post.

I loved the square neckline and embroidery, but not the white, especially with small children who love to grab me with messy hands. Also the flutter sleeves were not very flattering.

So I dyed it using Rit dye in purple. I used the stove top method, which was rather tiring because I had to stand there and stir the entire time (nearly 30 minutes). The shirt itself is cotton, so it took the dye well, but the embroidery and the thread used to sew the shirt together is synthetic so it did not take the dye at all. That was okay with me since I did want to keep the contrast of the embroidery.

Then, using elastic thread, I sewed all around the edge of the sleeve to make it a puff sleeve instead of a flutter sleeve. I thought I'd share a tip for using the elastic thread: tie it off so it doesn't pull out. [This may totally be a given that everyone knows already, but I haven't seen anyone else say it, so I thought I would just in case.]

Leave the beginning and end tails of the thread long (at least a few inches) so it's easier to work with.

Using a needle, bring the regular thread through to the side with the elastic thread.

Tie in a knot several times and trim excess short.

And now I have a shirt in my favorite color! Yay for purple!

Have any of you used dye for your projects?