Five Elements

I made a set of four t-shirts for a friend and his family using a combined concept of the five elements of Japanese Buddhism and the five elements from that movie...you know, The Fifth Element, with Bruce Willis.

So we've got earth, fire, water, wind and then that fifth one. In Japanese it translates to "void", which is not very good at all considering that this was a wedding-type present.  Enter the fifth element from the movie:  love!  Perfect.  

This is a very, very loose translation of these elements, but here goes:  For earth I used cotton t-shirts...you know, because they are, like, of the earth.  It makes sense if you close your eyes and spin around ten times.  I also splurged and got some good old American Apparel ones.  I hate them.  Well, their advertising campaign, because they seem to portray kidnapped teens.  Very pathetic.

Next up, fire!  Or, in this case, the sun.  I used that Lumi solor-powered dye.  It was pretty cool.  My stencils went on pretty easily and then I dabbed them with this dye.  Again, it still smells like a hair salon and brought back many memories of unfortunate perms from my teenage years.

So here's a shot of their backyard progress on Sunday:  

From left to right we have the shirts that have been out in the sun from the longest amount of time to the least amount of time.

It got tricky from this point, because I had two minute intervals to grab one shirt, run it to the laundry room, take off the stencil and plunge it into hot water.  (Enter the third element:  Water!  I told you this was a very loose interpretation of these elements.)  And then they got dried partially in the dryer and partially in the air (Hello, fourth element:  Wind!).

The result:

I think they are kind of nifty.  The symbol on the chest is "water" in the Japanese/Chinese character.  It has a connection to his name (well, their names) and years ago I tried to convince him to get it as a tattoo.  I don't think he did.

I tried to be so careful not to get that dye on an other locations, but a little dot is on the male shirt and a few little dots sprayed onto the neckline of the toddler shirt when I took off the stencil.  I also did not account for bleeding during that two minute interval when I took the stencil off and plunged it into the washer.  There was enough light in the laundry room to activity the dye, so many of the characters are not as crisp as I would have liked.  See for yourself:

Boo.  Oh, well.  Now I know.  I feel bad that they are not perfect.  Hopefully he won't mind.  As for that fifth element...made with love for my dear friend! 

I stuck it all in the mail yesterday with the quilt and the bibs.  International shipping.  Sucks.  Balls.

Resources:

Tutorial from HowAbout Orange.

Lumi.

Other projects using this dye.

Nursery Evolution: Paint

Our little Kraken will be here in late February, so after I had finished all of the Christmas sewing, I dove right into the painting of the nursery.  My major source of inspiration for the room came from this nursery.  (P.S. the source site is called Cheap and Chic, but the crib in that photo comes in at a whopping 700 plus bucks...not so cheap.) Anyway, back to the room.  I loved the dark walls with all that vibrant color, so that's what I'm working on for the Kraken.

Here is a before shot:

It's a bit of a Gloomy-Gus-Green, wouldn't you say?  In the past this room has been a lot of different colors, as evidenced by the different layers around the trim and the baseboard:  gloomy-gus-green, seafoam green, baby blue...and now dark gray.

We used California Elements Zero-VOC paint in Walrus.  It costs a gazillion dollars a gallon, but the No-VOC was important to me.  I probably could have picked up a cheaper gallon at one of the big box home improvement stores, but we went with a local supplier.  Anyway, it's a good color and it's not too dark.  I was really worried about the room being too dark.  The photo that seems to be the truest to the actual in-person experience is that middle photo above.

The next step in the paint evolution:  stencils and colors.  A few months ago Young House Love posted about stenciling their office.  It looked labor intensive, but while checking out the site from which they bought their stencil, I came across this stencil, which I call Circle Dots.  I latched onto this idea of circles and dots and just couldn't shake it.  So I bought it.  Expensive, I know, but at least I got a little bit of a YHL discount--Royal Design Studio is one of their sponsors.  Yay!

While we were buying the Walrus paint, we picked up about nine or ten little sample 2oz paint pots.  They are usually priced at $3.99, but were on sale for two bucks.  They were mostly Benjamin Moore sample pots with one California Elements pot.  There are six stencils of varying circle dot sizes, so I placed them around the room using the radiator and the high window as a sort of guide, and I would work toward the middle of each wall.  I couldn't place them all in a row, because they would overlap and I only had five stencil brushes, so I was limited in the number of colors I could use at one time.  It took about a week from start to finish.

So here are the results:

Minnesota Vikings colors for the Kraken's dad!

Final stencil placement!

I was not a stickler for keeping them all at the exact same height.  It seemed more fun to have them rolling a bit.  It was really neat to mix and match all of the colors, but it was also hard to not use the same colors really close together.  Some of my brushes didn't work as well as others and I definitely need to go back around the room for some quick touch-ups, but I love how this turned out.  It makes me very happy!

And it also gets the kitty stamp of approval: