Summer of Love - Groovy Easy Tie Dye

By Randy W. ~ Ivory Employee

With summer upon us, it is really nice to find activities that take us outdoors. One really fun and relatively inexpensive activity for parties, family nights, or playgroups is to do a tie-dye station. There are a lot of Tie-Dye kits that can buy at any local crafts store, but they can be pretty pricey to do 15 or more t-shirts. At a recent event that I helped plan, I found a cheaper way to do it from scratch.



Items Needed
• Buckets, Squirt bottles, Rit® dye, water, and White t-shirts (just find old ones that you might just want to throw out)
• One with clean water
• One per every color dye (fun to use at least 2 colors)
• Rit® dye mixed into water (one box to every one gallon of water)
• Put it into squirt bottles or plastic baggies with a small hole cut out of one end of it, so it acts as a squirt bottle.
• One filled with one part white distilled to one part water.
• Lastly another bucket of clear water to wring out finished product.

Tie-Dye Instructions

1. DUNK IT! Dunk tee in bucket 1 of clean water to pre-soak.

2. TWIST IT! Roll or pinch shirts how desired

3. TIE IT! Elastic band the shirt as rolled or pinched

4. DYE IT! Squirt colored water onto segments of shirt as desired from squirt bottles OVER that color of water bucket. Be sure to wear long rubber gloves if you don't want colorful arms!

5. SOAK IT! Take colored tee STILL IN ELASTICS and drop into bucket number 3 that has vinegar and leave for 30 seconds to 1 minute

6. WASH IT! Then take the tee STILL IN ELASTICS and continually dunk in bucket 4 of water until the t-shirt does not drip any dyed water, only clean water (approximately 10-20 dunks)

7. SQUISH IT! You can also wring the t-shirt a little bit to get the excess dye out of the t-shirt

8. HANG IT! Unroll t-shirt and chuck elastics. Hang t-shirt on hanger.

9. DRY IT! If you're doing lots of tees, tie a rope anywhere outdoors for a clothesline.

10. WEAR IT! Sport the hippie look with bell-bottoms and headband!

Now... LOVE IT!

Laundry instructions: Wash Tie-Dyed tees by themselves for the first one or two times without detergent. Since it's permanent fabric dye, it should be safe to wash with other colors after that.

These photos are from our latest Ivory Homes Summer of Love 2 Tie-Dye Extravaganza that was at Highbury at Lake Park earlier this summer.

Also, see the JPEG file below for a 8.5”x11” flyer you can print out to show at your tie-dye party as you help to explain to everyone what the need to do (right click and save). Have questions about tie-dying? Feel free to email me using the "Contact Us" form and let me know…. I’d love to make your party a success!