If at first you don't succeed, Tie Dye Again!

I have wanted to try my hand at tie-dying for months now.  My eye was on a pair of purple jeans that I always wore with a solid top, and I thought the pants would look great in a fun tie-dye pattern on the bottom.

So the term "tie-dye" is not correct usage in this project.  There was no "dye" involved, only a "taking out" of dye by using bleach.

WARNING-SIDE RANT::  Who knows why I kept putting off completing this project...it was so EASY!  A few months back, when the idea first came to me, I picked up a bottle of hydrogen peroxide at the drug store (thinking I would use that as my beaching agent).  Why H2O2?  I don't now know why.  My brother used to use it back in high school to lighten his hair, but I don't know why I just didn't go straight to using bleach.  DAH!  :FINISH RANT

I found what I was looking for yesterday when surfing blogland: Katherine at MakingChickenSalad, tutorial for bleaching out denim.

As soon as naptime commenced, I was gathering up my materials and starting on my project.

Problem is, I have a real deficiency in following directions.  As soon as my pants were ready to go in to the washing machine, I threw them in and then turned on the water.  Wrong!  By the time I added the bleach (and I threw in the H2O2 for extra power, not sure if adding that was really was worth it) the jeans were already soaked with the hot water...I didn't allow for them to properly soak-up the bleach solution.  DOH!  As soon as I realized my mistake, I went back to the tutorial and read everything sentence by sentence.  What I decided to do was just finish out the wash/rinse cycle, post wash with detergent, and throw in the dryer to see what I got:

Some parts were not bad, but the good areas were mostly up at the waist and nothing done to the legs.  Well I did manage to get one star-burst on the leg, but it was much more subtle than I wanted.  So next naptime, back to the beginning (which included a trip to the grocery store to purchase more bleach) .  I re-banded and this time I added the bleach (I used maybe one quarter of the bottle) to the hot water BEFORE adding the jeans.  I left it to soak for about 2 hours.  When I went to check on it, what came out was entirely pink!  "Oh no!  I've OVERDONE it this time"  But, again, I went through the rest of the steps (wash, rinse, repeat with detergent, and dry).  I'm pretty happy with what I got in the end.

Now I can't wait to wear these and show off my handy-work!  :-)