home tie-dye project

[firecat]

Last weekend I had

• the house to myself
• several white T-shirts (I don't like wearing white T-shirts; I don't like how they look on me)
• two tie-dye kits that had been sitting around the house for years
• an issue of Craft Magazine with an article on tie-dye
• a laundry tub newly installed in the garage

So I embarked on a tie-dye project.

Both kits came with rubber gloves and instructions.

The first kit, called "Tie-Dye Rope," didn't work out so well. It came with several very small packets of soda ash and some dye-impregnated strings, not really particularly rope-like, more like pencil roving. It was hard to tie the stuff onto the shirts, and since there was only a small amount of soda ash, the dye came out pretty faint. I haven't taken pictures of these shirts.

The second kit, Jacquard Funky Far Out Groovy Tie Dye Kit, came with a large packet of soda ash and three squeeze bottles with Procion dye powder in them. The rubber gloves had rotted away while the kit had been sitting around the house, but the rubber bands had not. They were really, really, really sturdy. Using this kit was messy (the squeeze bottles leaked and the dye saturated the fabric and puddled on the plastic) but I was happy with the results. I did three shirts and had dye left over, which I freecycled.

Comments

[firecat]

Thanks! That sounds like a good way to use the impregnated strings.