Tie Dye Fun!

This is the second time this summer we had fun with tie dye. The first time was at R10's birthday party. We decided it might be fun to make new shirts while camping last weekend. I think it would have been more fun had the water at the campground been you know...not brown. Ahem. But we pressed on despite choosing to leave a day early and having to pack out as we did this. Time was a bit short...and we had to bring in water from the camp store. Who wants white turned brown tshirts to dye with?

I8's creation. He wanted vertical stripes and the key is to pleat the shirt opposite what you want the stripes to look like...a lesson we learned in June when he ended up with one very cool horizontal striped shirt?

E11 tried to do a mirror image shirt which worked, but you have to look closely to see it.

R10 did a nice job with lots of knots all over her shirt- she want more than one spiral and we experimented with a color not in our kit.

J5's shirt...he did the spirals and I chose the colors.

This is Dan's shirt- I was running out of dye so it got a big time shortchanged. Bummer.

Once again I did some socks. These are kinda fun. I did one pair random and one pair sort of striped.

And finally my shirt. I chose an older, really thick white Old Navy shirt and I wanted to do horizontal stripes. I did the sleeves separately from the main portion of the shirt. That was a big job! Next time I'll make sure the dye covers more, but this was a crazy bulky shirt.

We did three families worth of shirts that day. All tolled it was 14-16 projects! We had two kits going. This will be fun to add to each summer I think and I'm going to try some different techniques next year. One is pretty subtle. Should be fun. We use the Tie Dye kit from Jacquard which has a great DVD in it. We learned a lot about technique from watching it so it's definitely worth your time.

I think it's interesting how our playroom carpet has so many varieties in this series of pictures. The one just above this text is probably the closest to the real thing. Just so you know.