Or: how to out yourself as an anime nerd in front of your entire laboratory.

So, one thing I've always wanted to do since purchasing a lab coat is to liven it up a bit. Numerous options presented themselves--an element jersey (e.g. "Lithium" in block letters across the shoulders above a big "03"), tie-dyeing, a less flamboyant single-color dye job, random sharpie doodling--but none of them really captured my imagination until I realized that, hey, doesn't the coat look vaguely like the white haoris that Bleach Shinigami captains wear?

The seeds of destruction were sown. Yesterday, not wanting to spend too much time on the 'net lest I finally get hit with some major spoilers, I enlarged and printed out the rhombus and kanji for the number 12 as well as a circle I could use as a pattern and traced them in pencil onto the fabric. I went with the 12th Division, naturally, that being the sciencey/researchy one, and plus it was the old haunt of Urahara, my favorite character. ^_~

I pinned the coat down on a cork bulletin board while I was tracing and coloring so it wouldn't move around too much. I used a sharpie/magic marker to color. The lines were largely pretty clean but unfortunately the sharpie ink bled a bit, most spectacularly on the middle hem which quite a lot of the rhombus and kanji were on. Le sigh. Looking back, I think I should have done the initial outlining with a thinner sharpie and colored it in with the big one. Ah well. There are also a few random dots were I accidentally touched the marker to the fabric while holding it between my fingers. Professional I am not.

Being the kind of person who has, in the past, cleaned up pictures on the pixel-by-pixel level, I'd like to fix the places that bled the worst. I'm not sure how--my sister suggested white-out, which might work. Do those bleach (the chemical, not the anime/manga) pen thingees work on sharpie ink?

The pattern on the hem goes all the way around, but I didn't take a picture of the front because that's where all the acid burns and potassium permanganate stains are. I are srs scientist. My hair covers up the design when it's not in a ponytail, but hopefully you denizens of the University of Calgary will see me sweeping dramatically through the hallways on my way to the ice machine sometime soon.