Name: andrea
Message: Hi! I'm planning a "Love Fest" at my school for this 4 20. How would i go about making a Pot Leaf design on a shirt? thanks`

Many leaves' patterns, including those of marijuana leaves, have an obvious symmetry that can be exploited in tying for dyeing. It will take you a great deal of trial and error to become an expert at this sort of design, however.

A simpler method would be to combine tie-dyeing or low water immersion dyeing for the background of the shirt with an iron-on for the design on the front. There are three main approaches to consider:

1. You can dye the whole thing in dark colors and then make a white or pale-colored iron-on with special opaque print-your-own iron-on transfers. You can do this using a home inkjet printer, or, with the appropriate paper, on a photocopier machine. Or,

2. You can dye all but the middle, leaving the middle front of the shirt white or pale, and then iron-on a dark print-your-own iron-on transfer (which then does not need to be the opaque type). I like to grab the center of a shirt, runner band it to keep it together, and then stuff all but the rubber-banded portion into a small bucket for low water immersion dyeing, or you can use the squirt bottle technique to dye a shirt while it is laid out flat, avoiding getting dye in the center. Or,

3. You can dye shirts that are 50% cotton and 50% polyester. The dye will come out as pastels, since only the cotton will take the dye. Then you can create your own iron-on transfer by hand, using the type of fabric crayons that will take only when ironed on to polyester or other synthetics. The hand-crayoned effect can be pretty cool looking, and each transfer can be reused several times.

You can buy ink jet or photocopier transfer paper at your local crafts store, or see Dharma Trading Company's Transfer Products page. Fabric crayons for making iron-ons are readily available, even in stores such as Walmart, or fabric stores; keep in mind that fabric crayons will not work on 100% cotton, however.

I like the non-opaque print-your-own iron-on transfers better than the opaque ones. The opaque ones produce wonderful photographic effects, but they tend to be fragile, and last very well only through a limited number of launderings, even when the shirt is carefully turned inside-out for washing. (They would probably last better, though, if the shirt were invariably line-dried instead of machine-dried.)