How to Tie Dye A Shirt

Hi Foxy Friends! So much has happened over the summer! For a much later post, I keep thinking, I should write about what we've been doing, but then time passes and it seems pointless...eventually I'll recap it...maybe. Anyway moving right along. We went to Hawaii this summer with some friends, actually two sets of friends, the first 6 days with some family friends and the last 4 days was spent with school friends. What do you do when you are traveling with other people, you make shirts of course.

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I made the first set of shirts using my circut. Here's a video on I did it. I think they turned out pretty great. In case you wanted to know what shirt we are wearing, we are wearing these the kids are wearing these, both shirts are in Tropical Blue.

For the second set of shirts, we decided to do a little Tie Dying, because who doesn't love that? We had to make shirts for 11 adult shirts (5 woman, 6 men) and 8 kids, so 19 shirts in total, and we only needed one bucket of Tie Dye. Granted the last few shirts were all of the left over colors, see Mr.'s shirt, it was black and green. It ended up working out, and the adult men didn't particularly care.

Tie Dying is super easy! Don't be overwhelmed. Sorry I didn't take pictures of all of the steps. Let's get to it.

What You'll Need:

Tie Dye Kit
Shirts (same as the ones from above)
Water
Bucket

Directions:

Step 1: Get shirts wet, we filled up the sink with water and let them soak for a few minutes, then you have to really wring out the shirts so there isn't dripping water.

Step 2: While the shirts are soaking, start filling your bottles with water. The kit comes with powder in each bottle, you need to add water and shake.

Step 3: Use the rubber bands given in the kit (they gave us enough that we didn't have any any issues with running out, even with all of the shirts we dyed) and shape and tie your shirts.

There are so many different patterns you can do. Two of us did hearts on our shirts, and I think it turned out pretty good. Really you can't go wrong, I YouTubed How to Tie Dye and found a bunch, also Googled and got a bunch of hits as well. But the directions in the kit give you the basic ones and that's pretty much what we did.

Step 4: Protect your table (we did it on the grass so it didn't totally matter, mostly we put something down because we didn't want grass on our wet shirts).

 Go to town on the shirts. Don't forget to dye both sides of your shirt. And remember that the colors are going to spread a bit, so if you are using more than one color, don't put them too close together. Or be aware of what colors make what, like blue and yellow will make green, so if you don't want a ton of green space out your colors a bit.

note: make sure to use the gloves given, or your own as the dye does dye your hands and it takes a few days to get it off. 

This is all of the shirts all done.

Shirt decorating is most fun late at night right? If we had more time I probably wouldn't have put some Vinyl on it, but I didn't, we left for our trip the next day.

Step 5: We put our shirts in baggies, each shirt got it's own baggie. Leave in baggie for at least 24 hours.

Step 6: After 24 hours, rinse out the shirts in the sink. Trying to get all of the excess dye out. We didn't want to have to do  19 loads of laundry, so what we did was washed them and used a color catcher. Seemed to work as nothing was leaked onto another shirt. Wash as normal, and enjoy!

They turned out great and the kids love wearing them post trip. It's really easy and super fun to make them, and yes a little messy! Enjoy!