Tie Dye for Dummies

 

So there are several projects I want to make or do before our Disney trip in April.  For some reason I feel like this might be our last big trip to Disney.  The kids are excited but no where near as excited as they have been in the past for these trips. 

I made the headband and the autograph book already. 

What was left was a tie dye Mickey Mouse tshirt. 

There are several pinterest pins showing how to do this and several more blogs if you just google tie dye disney shirt.  I'm going to say that you'll probably get better directions from one of those but I'll try to tell you how we did it.

We, is myself and Kelli.  She is leaving in two days for her family trip so this was our last chance to make them. 

So here we go 10 tie dye tshirts coming up.  I tried to take photos but I skipped several steps. 

First of all prewash your shirts. 

You also need to cut your Mickey head shapes our of dark paper.  We used circle cutters from Creative memories to make our three circles. 

Place the mickey shape in between the front of the shirt and the back and trace the shape with pencil. 

The pictures below aren't very good but if you look close you can see the pencil outline.

 

 

Once your shape is traced you will need to use WAX covered floss to sew around the outline of the Mickey head.  Use a basting stitch, the simple up down up down stitch all the way around. 

This was the most time consuming part.  It took us quite awhile to sew 10 shirts. 

After you have sewn all the way around you need to pull the floss tight.  The below picture is Kelli tighting up one of her Mickey heads.  We were surprised how small that bunched up part was.  

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After you have that part bunched rubberband a one or two inch space under the where the floss is.  You'll want a this space so there is a white border around your Mickey head.  

 Once you have the above steps done soak your shirts in soda ash.  Apparently this helps to set your colors. 

Now heres a few things about this.

1.  We tie dye every summer at school and we never use soda ash so I'm pretty sure you could skip this.

2. Of the several blogs I read before we did this some said to soak them overnight some said 24 hours and then one said at least 20 minutes.  We went with 20 minutes.

 Here they are soaking in the soda ash. 

 Soaked t-shirts.

After they soak you have to roll them into a danish looking thing, lol.  I"m sorry no photos of us actually rolling the shirts.  If you look at the shirts below I will tell you that we just spun them in a circle till they were a round and danish looking.  Then we used several rubberbands to hold them in place. 

I bought the dye and the soda ash at Michaels.

Ok well here is where I have no more photos. 

Once our shirts were done soaking in soda ash we started the dye process.

First we turned the shirts with the Mickey head down and squirted the red dye all over that part.  As soon as we had that part saturated with covered it in saran and rubberbanded the saran tight.

We did all the red parts first. 

Next came the blue part.  We had turquise and navy.  We had a whole bucket of navy and just a small bottle of turquise.  We squirted some of the turquise into the tight folds and tried to get a few spots on the shirt with that lighter blue. 

Then we dipped the whole shirt except the red part into the bucket.  This saturated the whole shirt.

That was it.

Thats the dying process.

 Again different blogs tell you different things, some say let them sit overnight some say over several days.  I brought mine home and let them sit for about 6 hours.  I couldn't wait anymore to see if they turned out. 

So I took them to my sink and rinsed them.  I rinsed the red first and once that ran clear I rinsed the blue.  I didn't have any problems with colors running.  I hung them up downstairs and let them air dry.  Once they were dry I washed them in the washing machine and again let them air dry.

 All in all I am very happy how they turned out.  All four of mine turned out and Kelli said all six of hers turned out.  Some people commented on other blogs that the Mickey looked like a heart instead of the ears.  I think they must've had the ears too close together on the original drawing.  Ours were pretty far apart and the dye ran enough that they are still touching. 

The only thing I would change is the brightness.  Maybe those people that let their sit for days instead of hours get darker colors.  I think they would be darker if they could actually sit in the dye for a little bit.  We did not have the time or space to do that.  I also wonder if a different color wouldn't have been brighter.