Tie Dying!

I love our homeschool group. We meet for field trips, special classes and once a month meet for activity day. Activity days have different themes could be science related or history themed, or occupations, or just fun days. This was our last activity day of the school year so we had a field day. This year I again had the privilege of helping the kids tie dye shirts. Being a crafter I have tie dyed before but it's usually with the store bought dyes. For our activity day there is an AWESOME gal named Cheri that gets all of the supplies for it and the good stuff, the professional strength doesn't run off in the wash dye. Now it's always crazy doing this type of project with so many kids but I LOVE it. (Granted I do come home a bit "colorful") Even though things are crazy before we clean up, I get a chance to sneak in a project of my own.

This year I wanted to try making a tie dyed heart.
I saw a fabulous video on Tulip

The process was simple but took some patience to get things lined up.  First you dampen your shirt and fold it in half. Then using a pencil draw a 1/2 of heart shape (like you were going to cut one out of paper.)

Then carefully starting at the bottom of the heart fold and scrunch the shirt up along the line. You want your pencil marks to line up in a straight line. When you are finished scrunching you can adjust the folds to make sure things line up perfectly.










Then tightly rubber band it. Follow with a second one about an inch away from the first for a double heart.

Finally add additional bands underneath depending on the number of colors or personal preference.  I only wanted two colors to alternate to make it really stand out.  Those colors are actually Orange and Pink but it looks read both in the photo and real life.

For dying, the "top color" will be the center of the heart, the 2nd space is the "space around the heart" the 3rd space is your outside heart. Finally the rest of the shirt color.

After the dye has set, and you have removed the bands your shirt will look like:





















I have a blast doing this. I thank Cheri for being our "fearless" leader into the world of tie-dye  and all the moms that I have privilege to work with that make the day so much fun!