Tie Dye

We've been having way too much fun with Rit dye this week. It all started when Ethan took a white t-shirt to school. His teachers tie dyed shirts for the class to wear on field day. He came home with a bright purple shirt, which was his class color, but also happens to be Ethan's favorite color. After that, he begged for a couple of weeks for us to do tie dying at home. So Dustin went out and bought several colors of dye and a bunch of white shirts. Then after we did a little research online (nothing is done in this house without extensive research) we set up our first experiment in the kitchen.

We started with some basic colors. We figured we'd make some 4th of July shirts with the red and blue. We folded our designs, rubber banded the fabric and started dying. Throughout this experiment, we did everything right...almost. We took the shirts out of the hot dye and removed the rubber bands before rinsing them. So when we started to rinse, all the extra color from the red bled into the white spots, leaving them a lovely shade of pink. I tried giving them an extra rinse and spin in the washing machine, but no improvement. So our patriotic shirts were now red, pink and blue. Not only that, but Ethan and Owen had used some red and yellow on their shirts. So they had red, yellow, orange and pink designs. Blech! The funny thing is, the kids didn't seem to mind. They wore their shirts proudly, including Alivia in her tie dyed onesie! The pink actually worked out ok for her. Here are some pics of our first attempt at tie dying.



Dustin wore his pink tie dyed shirt to Walmart yesterday. He was determined to wear the thing in public and see if he got any reactions. When he came home, he told me that he got some strange looks. I'll have to get a picture of him on here.

Here are the pictures from our second attempt. This time we rinsed before and after we took the rubber bands out, and they turned out mah-velous!