DIY Bleach Pen Art Fail

There’s so many cute shirts, sweaters, and other clothing accessories that I see online. It’s usually clever little things that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise and it’s always sold from a random company that I’ve never heard of. You know, the typical things you find scrolling down Pinterest for hours. Then I become obsessed with it, but I’m someone who has to try things on and actually touch the items before I make a purchase so finding all these adorable outfit accessories online doesn’t really do me any good. Although I’m not very crafty and I don’t know how to sew, I still think it’s fun to try making things on my own. So in today’s post, I decided to try to make some DIY clothing pieces and decorating them with a bleach pen. Sounds easy enough...
DIY.jpg
It was an epic fail. The idea behind this is that you are supposed to be able to use a Clorox Bleach Pen, write or draw whatever you want on whatever piece of clothing you choose, leave it on for a few hours, rinse it with cold water and then you should be left with a personalized design. I read so many articles and watched so many videos explaining exactly what to do and I followed all of the steps just as they say, so I still have absolutely no idea what went wrong. But, it’s pretty bad.

I started with a plain red hat that I bought at Walmart. I chose to write “y’all” on it with a little heart because it’s short, easy to write, and something that totally reflects me. I shook the bleach pen to mix up the gel and started following the letters that I had drawn in pencil first. It looked perfect! After a few hours passed, I noticed the gel drying up and cracking a little bit so I decided to go over it again with another coat. Since the hat is pretty thick, I wasn’t worried about the bleach eating through the fabric so I let it sit overnight.
Hat.JPG
I rinsed it with cold water the next morning and literally nothing had happened. The hat looked just like it did when I bought it from the store. So I dried it and tried again...three times. At this point, I was over the bleach pen. It didn’t say anything on it about being color safe bleach and is exactly what I had seen in the videos I watched. So I decided to make my own bleach pen with an old marker and plain bleach that I already had. I did three coats of that before deciding to rinse and you can see in the final picture below that letters are just barely visible. The bleach pen I made myself did eat away a little bit on the “y” and by the time I noticed it, I was so over trying to make this work.
Y'all.JPG
Same thing happened with a shirt that I tried to make. This is a plain shirt I had sitting in a drawer, waiting for the perfect DIY project to do something with it. I decided to write “coffee & mascara” on it because what other two things does a girl need?! Again, once I wrote on it with the bleach pen it looked perfect. I was so excited and couldn’t wait to see the results. I didn’t let this sit as long as the hat because it’s a more thin material and a brighter color. So after about two or three hours, I rinsed it. Nothing happened.
Shirt.JPG
I decided to try again with my own bleach pen instead of the gel and as you can see in the final picture below, that didn’t work either. You have to squint your eyes to even try to make out what the words say and even then, it’s hard to read because all of the letters are bleeding together. I didn’t try as much with the shirt as I did with the hat because it’s bigger, had more words and took longer to dry. I gave up after I saw that two coats of the gel and one coat of my bleach pen didn’t work.
Bleach.JPG
This was a week’s worth of bleaching and trying over and over again. I am so disappointed! And it’s even worse that I have no idea what went wrong. I had my fiancé helping me through all of this and he doesn’t even understand why this didn’t work. I almost decided against writing this post and was close to replacing it with something else, but I thought I should still put it up and show you my experience. Whether you got a good laugh or had some of the same issues, I hope you enjoyed. If you try this DIY project yourself, I wish you much better luck!

~Mani Monday~
I was looking back at old pictures recently and came across one of me eating at Bruxie, one of my favorite places in California. They only have a few locations and I used to go there as much as I could. I’d always get the same thing, their club sandwich (which was served on a Belgian waffle, yummm). If you ever get the chance, you have to try it! When looking at that picture, I couldn’t help but notice what nail polish I was wearing - of course! It was a Sinful Colors polish in the shade Orange Cream. I love the way this looks on my nails and that is exactly what I decided to wear this week.
Orange Cream.JPG
What’s on your nails this week?

~Christina~

Don’t forget to follow me on all of my social media!

Popular Posts