Let me tell a story

For my birthday, my parents gave me an iPhone. (Yay!) This is the first internet capable phone I’ve had, and I may be having too much fun downloading free apps for it. I also possibly find it a bit too amusing that my first time reading Pride and Prejudice was on my phone. ^_^

But one of the things that bothers me about iPhones is there’s not a lot you can easily customize about them. You can change the background image, and you can have a case to help protect the shiny finish. So of course I made a background for my phone, and I wanted to make a unique case for it. Since I’ve been really looking forward to having a more complete Steampunk costume for the Ball at the end of the month, I decided to do a Steampunk inspired phone case.

In my online search for cases, I found some wooden cases, giving me the idea to customize mine by burning an image into the wood. My search then became finding a wood case in my budget–under $20. Most of the reviews for wood cases are pretty bad, since the carved wood is fragile. With some cases, you can’t charge your phone with the case on or some of the side buttons aren’t accessible. The nicer cases can be upwards of $100, which I sure wasn’t willing to spend. I eventually came across this one:

At only seven dollars, I wasn’t going to pass this one up. And if I happened to really screw up my modifications, not much lost. My first step then was to find an image I wanted to burn into the wood. I wanted to do something with Victorian swirls, but I’m terrible at making them myself. I did a quick image search to find some inspiration for the swirls, and since I’m going with the Steampunk theme, I found an image with gears I could draw from as well. I traced around my phone for approximate size and sketched this:

I copied my sketch onto tracing paper so I could transfer it onto my case, but before I could transfer it, I had to sand off the case’s finish. Thankfully from the shop build I have a battery powered sander that took off the finish quickly and evenly. From there, I transferred my image and burned it into the wood. Remember folks, wood-burning is best done in a well ventilated area, not the dining room. Heh. ^_^;

After the design was finished, it needed to be sealed. Using a small brush and some quick dry polyurethane, I applied two coats to reseal the wood. Once the polyurethane had completely dried, I glued five watch gears near the large hole. It would have been awesome to rivet the gears onto the case so they could rotate, but I don’t have the tools to do that. Anyway, I’m really happy how this came out!

Hallowe’en Countdown: 17 days

Continued from Part 2…

When I was in painting class, one of the things I had to remember was that paint always dries darker than it looks when it’s wet and spreadable. This is also true when dyeing fabric, only I completely forgot about that when I finished the dye bath, poured all my dye down the drain, rinsed out the fabric and set it up to dry. So the next morning when the fabric was fully dry, I was a bit disappointed to see that my parasol wasn’t a nice deep red as I had intended, it was fuchsia and black lace.

I let it stay fuchsia for the next couple of days, wondering if maybe I’d like to keep it that way. So those days went by. And no, I want my black and red parasol! Solution? Re-dye!

I got a new bottle of Crimson Rit dye to use, and instead of only leaving the fabric in the bath the minimum time, I kept the parasol fabric in the dye for nearly an hour and a half in an over-saturated dye bath. This time I took note of the fabric becoming darker than what I wanted knowing that it would lighten after it was rinsed and dried.

I let it dry on the porch, and this time around the thunderstorm didn’t start pouring down rain and thrash my wet parasol around with the wind. It took a couple of hours to fully dry, but the result is a darker, less fuchsia red! A red that I am quite happy with.

Continued from Part 1…

Starting materials:
Black and white lace parasol
Crimson Rit dye
Wine Rit dye
plastic bucket
scissors
bath tub

Before getting to the wet part of dyeing the fabric, I had to separate the fabric from the metal frame. At certain points, the lace and fabric were secured onto the metal parasol frame by some stitching like this:

I cut and removed the threads from each point, two per frame arm. After all these points of thread were cut, I could easily pull the fabric away from the frame.

Time to dye! Mostly following the instructions on the Rit dyes’ packaging, I partly filled my bucket with hot water from the bath tub spout. Using the handle and frame as my handles, I soaked the lace and fabric in the hot water to prepare it for the dye bath.

My original plan was to mostly use Crimson dye and add a little bit of Wine dye to get the color I wanted, but when I poured my crimson dye into the bucket, there was barely any there at all. Um, oops. I went ahead and emptied out the bottle of crimson dye, then added what I figured would be enough wine dye to get a nice thorough color. I then dipped the fabric into the dye still using the wooden handle and metal frame as my handle and also kind of the stir stick.

I agitated the dye by the handle of my bucket, swirling it around a bit, and I turned the fabric often, trying to keep from accidentally dunking the wooden handle into the dye. Although the wood shaft is sealed, I didn’t want to chance it taking any of the dye.

After twenty minutes in the dye, it looked great! The color looked exactly like I wanted it, just all wet and shiny. I poured the water and dye mix down my bath tub’s drain, supplementing it with running water to try to keep from turning the tub pink.

After a ridiculous amount of rinsing the dye out of the fabric, I made the assumption that although I probably shouldn’t dunk the metal frame into water, it probably won’t hurt it if I go ahead and stretch the lace and fabric over it to let it dry out easiest. So I wrung out the fabric to at least keep as much of it from dripping down the metal frame as possible and hooked the fabric and lace back over the metal spokes.

I set it out on the porch fully open so that the stupidly hot Austin heat could dry out the fabric quickly. Unfortunately, someone ordered up a thunderstorm about two minutes after I set it on the porch! I moved the parasol back inside to keep it from getting soaked by the rain and thrashed by the wind, leaving it in the kitchen overnight to dry.

Check out the results I got dyeing my parasol here in part three!