Arts Monday- Tie Dyeing

Techniques we used to Tie-Dye our shirts.

First, we bought all our stuff at Dharma Trading Company
They have quality products and a good quality dye is key to having a quality outfit when you are done.

We washed and dried the shirts before beginning. We tied off the shirts before we soaked them in soda ash water. This way we saved some time the day of the tie-dying. Thank god we did this because we were way over-zealous with the amount of shirts to tie-dye. Thanks for that fabulous tip Cyndy.

Now a brief history. The point of tie dyeing is to prevent the dye from reaching the fabric evenly. Any place that the dye can't reach will stay white, or a lighter color, of course. You can accomplish this by folding the fabric, tieing it with string, using rubber bands, etc.
Another reason to tie is that it makes each garment of piece of cloth a small, neat bundle--much easier to handle if you have a lot to do. If you don't tie, but just apply the dye directly, you need more space and can do fewer garments or pieces of fabric at a time.

Ways to Tie:
Bulls Eye
For concentric circles, grab the cloth where you want the center to be, and pull, until you've more or less made a long tube of the garment, then apply rubber bands at intervals along the fabric. (Beware of having red in the center of the bulls-eye pattern because it could look like you were shot. Darren thinks this is a very cool effect but others may not like it so much)

Pleats:
Fold a piece of clothing in vertical pleats, and you'll end up with horizontal stripes. Horizontal pleats result in vertical stripes .

Lay cloth on flat surface. Place thumbs of both hands together firmly on the cloth. Position fingers about an inch or two in front of your thumbs, and pinch the fabric to raise a fold. Continue to pinch up more pleats until you reach the end of the cloth. You can change directions as often as you want by gathering more material in one hand than in the other. Be careful not to lose any pleats.

Loop rubber bands or string very tightly around all the pleats several times and knot. You can use as many ties as you want. This useful technique is also employed in tying ovals, squares, diamonds or any shape you can imagine which has symmetry. Took these images and information from http://www.prochemical.com/directions/Folding.htm

Bunching:
For one shirt we just wadded the shirt up into a ball and stuck rubber bands around it. It turned out really cute.

Spider Design/ Spiral

Lay the garment on a flat smooth surface, smooth out all the wrinkles, then make a small pleat right across where you want the center to be. Grab the very center of that pleat with a clothes pin (or fingers or a fork) and using the weight of your fingers to hold the cloth in place, start twisting. After each twist, flatten the material with the palm of your hand to keep the folds from rising. With your other hand, bring the loose ends into the circle and continue to twist until the whole thing looks like a fat pancake.

Now take rubber bands, and without disturbing the shape of the pancake slide the bands under the cloth so that they intersect at the center. Use as many as necessary to retain the circular shape, about twice the number shown in the illustration at right for most tie-dyes. Make sure you get into all the creases of the shirt. Anywhere you don’t get will be white.

We got this design from this video. We did some shirts with a spiral in them like this guy does. But my friend Cyndy showed me that you can tie-dye where the triangles are and it creates an alternating pattern that is very cool too. Just try it out. If you are doing this on cheap t-shirts you can test out different designs and colors then

The End Result!


I love this girls video
When we did the Spider Design above I used her fork idea and found it to be MUCH easier and create a much tighter spiral.
You can search YouTube for lots of great video examples/ ideas.

Be careful b/c the garment is wet and the die will bleed farther than you intended. If you don’t want the colors to mix you need to leave a white space.

Go out and give it a try. It was tons of fun. Thanks to Cyndy for expanding our horizons.