I purchased the Tulip One Step 18-Color Tie-Dye Kit off Amazon (currently on sale!) which includes everything you need to tie-dye (except your clothing). My friends and I purchased white tanks on sale at Meijer for us, and Hanes plain t-shirts and onesies for my toddler and newborn son.
The Tulip Tie-Dye Kit is pretty straight forward. Add water to the bottles, wrap rubber bands around your shirts, put on gloves, and squirt dye onto the shirts. Here are a few things I’d recommend:
1 – Do this outside! It’s super messy!
2 – Put down throwaway table clothes. The kit comes with one table covering, and I also used another one I had leftover from a birthday party to put on the ground.
3 – Don’t wear nice clothes during this project – the dye won’t wash out!
4 – The dye goes bad after awhile, so make sure to make a ton of shirts, tote bags etc., while you have the dye ready to go. You can’t reuse them later.
5 – Make sure to wash the items you want to tie-dye first (t-shirts, totes, etc.). I did not do this, and the dye kind of just rolled off my tank top, instead of saturating it. It still came out nice, but it would have been even better if I had washed them first.
This is such a fun craft project that EVERYONE can enjoy. I had to help my son put the rubber bands on his shirt, but he had a blast squirting the colors on his shirt (as you can see from the picture, he went a little overboard with the blue). I received compliments on my tank – people are surprised to hear that we made them at home!
If you have any tie-dye tips I’d love for you to share them in the comments below!
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That sounds fun, though I have no tie-dye tips lol. We did this once when I was on swim team in high school, though, and they came out nice.
How fun! I remember tie dying shirts when I was a kid. It was fun, but it didn't turn out as vibrant as the tie-dye shirts I used to see every year at the Wyandotte Art Fair. That was my only other reference to tie-dye back then.
Did you grow up near Wyandotte? I grew up in Southgate 🙂