Sharpie marker vs. polyester

I found another shirt that I really like with my DragonCon steampunk owl catcher costume. The only problem is that it's black, gray, and white, and my costume is mostly brown. I needed some brown in the shirt.

It's 65% polyester, 35% rayon, so I tried RIT dark brown dye to see if it would take. I used the entire bottle of dye (with a cup of salt). I worried that simmering the pot of dye would mess up my shirt, so instead I used almost boiling water but turned off the heat so it wouldn't simmer. I kept the shirt in the dyebath for about half an hour, stirring it frequently to make sure it would dye evenly.

When I took it out of the dyebath, I put the dyed-gray jacket from last week in. I thought a bit of brown might make the gray a warmer shade that would go better with my outfit. That was before I rinsed out the shirt and realized the dye had turned it purple.

A light purple, barely a tint of pink, but definitely not brown. Not brown at all. And most of the dye rinsed out anyway. I thought maybe the stock pot I've been using for dying (it was a crappy stock pot but makes a good dye pot) was aluminum instead of steel as I'd thought, and it had reacted with the dye. I took the jacket out of the dye bath after barely ten minutes and rinsed it thoroughly in hopes that it wouldn't turn purple.

Instead, it had dyed to a marvelous deep brown. And when I ran it and the shirt through a delicate cycle of the washing machine, it stayed deep brown while the shirt lost almost all the purple tint--fortunately, but I was then back to where I'd started.

I'd gotten the shirt on clearance, probably because it had a small tear in the back bottom hem. Since it wasn't one I could wear to work because of the tear, I decided to try something else. I got out my brown Sharpie pen and got to work.

I shaded brown above several of the black stripe patterns to see how it looked. I really liked the effect, so I kept going. I'd finished the front and one of the sleeves when I realized the Sharpie marker, permanent though it's supposed to be, might not work on polyester any better than the dye had. But when I rinsed a section of the Sharpied shirt in water, the marker remained even when I scrubbed.

So hurrah! Sharpie wins! I haven't finished the back--I got too tired to continue, and it's bedtime anyway--but I tried it on with my corset and it looks good (if still a tiny bit purplish, although maybe that's just the light in the bathroom). The real test will be after I run it through the washing machine, but I think it'll be okay. It looks like the pattern of a barred owl's breast to me, which is why I like it so much.

Tomorrow I hope to have the skirt finished, and if it looks good I'll put a full tutorial up on how I made it. So far it's just what I had in mind.