Blue Glue Tie Dye

I'm back after a couple of months break for a move to South Africa. I just got Internet---setting these things up can be rather slow here and so now I am posting an update to a summer project with the kids.

Every summer at our church we have done tie dye with the children. This summer, I decided, rather than the usual tie dye to give my kids a chance to work with an easy, non-toxic resist befor dyeing. I first had my boys use a pencil to draw their ideas on the t-shirt. The photo above is from my 6 year old's design and as you can see it was based on the alphabet. I told him we can not make the lines too thin, so he came up with the idea of drawing 'bubble' letters. I helped him fill in the shapes with the glue but it is really not too hard for kids to do it themselves. I love the urban decay look he got from the brown and purple dye used. The photos below are from my eight year old's design. You can see he went for a two sided design.

If you decide to do a project like this you may need the following tips. No line should be smaller than 1/4 inch. In order to see the lines you will need to really make sure there is a lot of dye around the resist area. It is really hard to get blue glue out of jersey knit. I suggest following the usual means of setting your dye (we left ours in the sun for a day, rinsed with cold water, washed with other dyed clothes and then dried) and then set your resist area in a bowl, cover with very hot (read boiling) water and let sit. The very hot water will soften the glue and you can then scratch it off.