Giving Tie Dye Another Try

While life has not been normal of late, we have tried to find some sense of normalcy whenever we can. One of our normal summer traditions is creating a patriotic t-shirt to celebrate Independence Day. We tried tie dye about nine years ago and the dye ran together and ended up creating purplish t-shirts. I’ve learned some things since then and so we decided to make another attempt at creating a tricolor design. The kids all had a great time. Daniel and Nathan both spent a considerable amount of time getting the dye just where they wanted it. We’ll have to wait a day or two to see the final outcome, but it was a fun way to spend an afternoon.

Red Dye and Blue

The boys really like to have flag shirts when the 4^th of July rolls around. This year we opted to make patriotic shirts instead of buying them. We found a fun idea for tie dye shirts on Pinterest, so we gathered all of our materials and got to work this morning. When the dying was done and we took the rubber bands off, the shirts looked absolutely amazing!! But then we washed them and the colors bled and they looked a little less amazing. Red, purple and blue was not quite as striking as red, white and blue. I followed all the directions and rinsed the shirts like crazy before washing them, but clearly I’m not a tie dying rock star. Nevertheless, we had a good time. And even though the boys were disappointed that their shirts turned out purple, they still think they look pretty cool.

(I thought it would be hard to get Malia to look at the camera, but it was actually harder to get Nathan to look!)

I have a couple of ideas that I’m hoping will prevent the horrible color bleeding, so we’ll have to give tie dying another whirl one of these days.