Tie Dye Party

I enjoy doing all kinds of fabric arts and I really enjoy sharing them when I can. Last weekend we invited several families over and had a tie dye party.  As has been said many times before by other people, when you teach something, you also learn.  For the party, I looked at several Youtube videos to broaden my tie dye design skills.  I can recommend videos by colorfulsteve such as this one on how to tie dye a heart design.  If you try to dye a shape, be very careful to fold your fabric in a straight line.  This is easier if your shape is large and bold.  Steve suggests outlining your shape with a dark color.  This suggestion helps your shape have definition.
To the right is my oldest and youngest in thier tie dyes.

Blue Glue Take 2

This is a picture from about two months ago. It features the same blue glue technique as described in the October blog entry. I found that I needed to enhance the resist effect on all of the pieces that I tie-dyed for the baby but one. In this case I outlined the trees drawn in the resist with permanent marker (Pigma Micron.) The shirt is wearing well. As I mentioned before, I do not recommend blue glue resist on knit fabrics, as it is so hard to get out. If anyone has a glue removal tip for me, please post it to the comments.

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.