Sorry about the terrible pun - maybe I inhaled too many toxic dye fumes. As some of you may know I am organising our school's summer fair again this year. It's a small school, the teaching based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and my three children all go there. I have a great team of people who are planning everything with me and I'm going to have a little table to sell some of my stuff. The children don't wear a uniform but there are rules like no strappy tops, no midriffs showing, no logos and the like. So each year I do a batch of tie-dye T-shirts - some for my boys (Amber doesn't wear them anymore) and some to sell.
So with four days to go I decided it was today or never. A friend had Raj after Kindy so I that I had a good six hours. Fortunately or not, Amber was off school with stomach cramps and I told her the best remedy was to keep busy! After washing the T-shirts we had a tie-ing blitz and then it was onto making up the dyes and dyeing. I love the bit when the T-shirts first come out of the colour and you open them up and smile with pleasure or wrinkle your nose with disappointment. There was more of the former but also some of the latter. The pinks and blues worked beautifully, the light blue was too wishy-washy for my liking and the purple was nice but a bit grey in some places.
I'm going to post up a how-to-do just as soon as the T-shirts dry and I can photograph some of the patterns. I tend to go for spirals, concertina folds, sunbursts and rings made with marbles. It's a great activity to do with children and fairly inexpensive - plain white T-shirts don't cost much and I just use Dylon dyes.
Tye die is so cool. I had to tye die loads of white sheets, to use as table clothes for a school fete, the theme was hippies!! I had so much fun. For me I loved the yellow die the best.
Posted by: weirdbunny | June 28, 2006 at 05:36 PM
i love youre shirts! My mom and i are going to tie die my sheets and doona multy coloured - do you have any sugestions?
Posted by: Amber | March 18, 2009 at 07:55 PM