Analytics Shirts!

During my first departmental meeting at my job, my boss brought up the fact that he had asked the design team to help bring his dream of an Analytics logo to life. The concept featured a capital letter A with super-ripped arms clutching fistfuls of cash, eagle wings keeping the A hovering over lightening-filled clouds, and a Latin motto overhead.

Shortly thereafter, we had a mock-up from a member of the design team, hopefully made outside of work hours. My company might just be the most delightfully ridiculous place ever. I love it.

At my company, every department gets a quarterly allowance to do team building activities. A while back, my boss approached us and said that for our next team building, he wanted to use our logo and make bleach-dyed shirts and that he wanted me to organize it.

Cue me getting very excited and throwing together a quick email with the different techniques for bleach-dying, complete with photo examples.

Here's how we made our Analytics logo shirts!

First, we gathered our supplies.

• Shirt
• Watered-down bleach in a spray bottle - 1 part bleach to 2 parts water
• Contact paper
• Cardboard
• Tape
• Box cutter/exacto knife
• Any other supplies you think you might need (tape measure, scissors, tailor's chalk, etc)

To make your stencil, sandwich a piece of contact paper between your pattern and a piece of cardboard. Tape the stencil to the contact paper and cut along the outside of your pattern. You have a choice of using the inside or the outside of the pattern. 

Then, you place your pattern on your shirt. Like I said, you have the option of using the inside (like this one) or the outside. With the inside, the design will stay the base color of the shirt and there will be a kind of sunburst around it of bleached shirt.

Here's an example of using the outside of the pattern. This way, the bleached part is the design.

You can see that the bleach has bled a little under the pattern. Spray sparingly with the bleach, because once it goes wild, it kind of ruins the outline.

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of all of us wearing our awesome shirts... Maybe I should make taking more pictures one of my goals next month...

But I can say that you can see my boss wearing his shirt in this post of his blog! He and his wife are travelling the world right now. Lucky ducks. Oh, and I should probably mention that his shirt is the one that turned out the best. He really took his time cutting out the pattern and then waited to see how everybody else's shirts turned out before actually bleaching. I, on the other hand, rushed right into bleaching things and ended up saturating the shirt...

So what should I bleach next???