tie-dye fun with kids

After holding off for months on doing this project with the kids, they finally wore me down and we've ventured into tie dye territory. What the heck- it's another teacher in-service day. Might as well do something semi-educational.

We've had these Tulip Tie Dye Kits in "brights" and "moody blues" since the summer. I think I was dreading the mess, but we could have done the project outside then. We managed with trash bags laid out on the floor, but these are serious dyes. I was careless and stained my hands fairly permanently.

The kits each come with 4 squirt bottles of dye that you mix up from a powder. They are not stingy with the dye. No dipping involved with these kits. We had a couple of kids over and did 8 shirts and still had plenty of leftover dye. Unfortunately it does not have a long shelf life, so you can't keep it for later.

The kits come with rubber bands and suggestions for how to get different effects. The kids were more interested in just winging it.

After reading the directions more closely, we were disappointed to learn that we would not get instant gratification. The shirts had to be sealed up in bags for 6-8 hours before rinsing and laundering.

This is what they looked like the next day. Not as saturated as a true dipped tie-dying, but not bad!

 

À la Jackson Pollack.

Hey this swirly pattern based on the enclosed directions actually kind of worked!