Summer Break - Day 9 - Tie Dye

Today's summer fun activity was Tie Dye!  This was a project we had never tackled before.  Luckily, some of our experienced tie dyer friends joined us!

We set up our equipment on the surface of the sun...or in the backyard...it's hard to tell the difference around here.

And then we threw some dye around.  It was a lot of fun!  Our kit said it would make 9 items, but that wasn't nearly enough for the 8 items Ginny and I wanted to dye.  Luckily our friends brought a ton of extra dyes!

Here are our projects all bundled up for the 4-8 hour dye setting time.  We actually let our sit for 24 hours.

And here is a rainbow bandana that looks pretty sharp after rinsing.

And Ginny's crumple shirt.

But something didn't go quite right in the wash.  Maybe our detergent works too well?  Everything faded quite a bit.  We also didn't use quite enough dye to really saturate our bigger items, so we found when we unwrapped them, that there were still quite a lot of white areas left.  I wanted some white to show, but not that much!

So if we do it again, we now know that we should buy more dye than we think we'll need.  And apparently there are a lot of reasons the dyes might fade on washing, including crummy fabric (quite possible in our case!) or hard water.  I also saw a recommendation to leave the dyed pieces in the sun.  Heat will help the dyes bind with the fabric.  We brought our dyed pieces inside because we thought it was too hot outside for them!  Ah well.  Lessons learned.

But we had a good time anyway!