Day 2 was focused on tie-dyeing and silk screening fabrics and tees, which is a part on apparel design and merchandising.
First off, we met as usual outside the design school and our senior, Serena brought us to the fabric dyeing workshop in the design school and there were welcomed by a lecturer and the operator of the workshop(Mr Wilson), i didn't quite catch their names.
we were firstly briefed by the operator on what we were going to do that day, firstly was tie-dyeing and the next was silk screening after lunch. There was an array of tie-dyed tees laid out infront of us and we got to know they were all done by the operator. Everyone was in Awe when we saw the tees as they all looked so pretty and nicely dyed.
He then proceeded to teach us different methods of dyeing the fabrics/ tees that would produce different patterns and results, mainly there was around five methods that he taught, like the heart, twister, the pipe, triangle and marbles. i was so excited to try them out myself. Although there was only a few main colours, like yellow,red,green,orange,blue and black, we could mix the colours ourselves. The procedure was long, which includes soaking the fabric in water first, dye it after that, blow dry it for roughly 5-8 minutes and let it go through the fabric dryer a few times.
After that we were all given pieces of white fabrics to experiment and to play with the different dyes. everyone was enjoying themselves tremendously as we were all interested and fascinated by each others' works. no one piece of fabric came out the same! After playing with around five pieces of fabric and trying out different fabrics, it was time to tie-dye our own t shirt!
I used the "twister" method and dyed my shirt in yellow, red, blue and green. It turned out really colourful , looked a tad bit weird in the beginning but i loved the outcome. It was also interesting to see the t-shirts of others as everyone's shirts sort of reflected their own personality by the choice of colours they used.
After lunch, we had a go at silk-screening. Silk screening is actually the technique that most factories use to print words/ pictures on t-shirts. It was actually much easier than tie-dyeing but we were all reluctant about the washing up of equipment immediately after that. silk-screening is also not limited to only one colour and we were taught that multiple colours can also be used on the template.
For me , i did about four fabrics by silk-screening and i really loved how they came out to be.
After experimenting around with all the templates, we were then dismissed and that marks the end of day two of the school discovery program.
my tee
my friend's tee
silk screening