The Bee Hive

Sometimes it's honey; sometimes it's sting...

Friday, May 27, 2011

TIE-DYING

Yesterday Mathieu and I spent the morning tie dying t-shirts. It had been a while since we had done that, and I was a little rusty on how to get it all acomplished in the easiest way possible. First, after washing and drying our new white t-shirts, we tied them by wrapping rubber bands around them in various places.
Meanwhile I heated water to near boiling on the stove. Then carried it out to the buckets with the dye powder waiting inside them. After some stirring to make sure the dye was dissolved, the shirts went in.


One of the shirts, we immersed only halfway in the blue dye, then later turned it the opposite way into the bucket of yellow dye so that we'd have blue, yellow and then green where the two colors overlapped.

I couldn't resist seeing if the blue dye would work on Coconut's white fur, so I dabbed a bit on her back. Of course it stayed light because it didn't get any soak time, but it did last. As much as she sheds, it will be gone before long.

Mathieu ran the hose on the shirts after they came out of the dye bath, then soaked them in clear water in a trough.

The only trouble we had was when the black shirts didn't get rinsed enough, and went into the dryer with the other shirts to help set the color, before they all went into the washer, then the dryer again. It turned the other colors sort of muddy. :/

But they turned out okay. Mathieu wore one of his right away, and I wore one of mine to the movies that afternoon, too. Annie and I went to see Medea's Big Happy Family.