Tie Dying Shirts - Left Over Easter Egg Dye Fun

After we dyed all those fun Easter eggs the other day, I thought it would be fun to tie dye some shirts. I did one with elastics and the girls did theirs in twirl patterns. I had never seen how they make the twirled patterns before. Princess number three made one once at an activity so she showed the other girls how to do the swirl pattern. I will try to explain it. I should have video taped but you know how slow my internet is so we will have to do it with pictures.

The girls picked up a piece of the shirt where they wanted the center of the twirl to be. You can see on the left shirt, she started the swirl at the bottom and to the side of center on her shirt. The others picked up a piece in the center. Then, you start to twirl the shirt around the piece you picked up. Twist the shirt evenly and once it becomes in a flat type of swirled ball, you take string and tie it in half, then half again and then once again. It then looks like a pie tin shaped shirt with 6 pieces of pie as the string makes it look like a cut pizza or pie.

Once you have the shirt sectioned off into pie shaped pieces, you use a squirt bottle or a spoon to drizzle the dye over the section you want that color. I suggest that you write the name of the person on the tag so that there isn't any issues as to whose shirt is whose. We all used the same dye so the girls got confused about the shirts.

We put the shirts on tin foil and let them sit. We did make a mistake however in not allowing the die to set. I thought I remembered something about drying them to set the dye and messed up by putting them in the dryer and also by taking off the string before the dye set. The shirts looked great until the dryer and that made the dye run causing a muted red dirt color and dulled the other colors as they hadn't set.

I read up on it later and found that if I left them in a bag for over 6 hours, the dye would have set and then I should have let them dry on their own and then washed and dried them alone so that the colors wouldn't run on the other laundry.

As it is, they are still cute but not as bright and fun as the original. I felt sad for the girls as they were really excited about the shirts so I told them we would make new one's and do it right.

Tomorrow, I will show you how I made the other shirt for our missionary. I also did some fun other things. This was a fun activity and cheap as I had the shirts from a clearance sale and the dye was second hand from yard sales etc and we had already used if for the eggs.

The method is quite easy and the results are fun. Even if the colors mix, the result is fun. I think the squeeze bottles would be easier but may waste dye so I would squirt the shirts over a glass bowl so you can use all the dye.