Tie Dyed Shirts

My kids both had the experience of tie-dying t-shirts at school this year. Jayce's class made shirts for field day, whereas Jaina's class just did it for fun. Both of them begged me to buy supplies to do some of our own. I promised as soon as school was out, we'd go for it.

So, on Memorial Day, we got all our stuff ready.

Then I hired two really good dye mixers:

I haven't tie-dyed since I was a little kid and I really didn't remember how to do it. Thank goodness for the internet! It showed us how to make spiral shirts.

Basically, you lay your white t-shirt out flat on a table. Then using a fork or your finger, you start twirling in the middle of the shirt, like you would to pick up a forkful of spaghetti. Keep twisting until the entire shirt is in a spiral. Then use a lot of rubber bands.

It advises you to use 3 colors, with the palest first. My kids basically did whatever they wanted with theirs and I followed the directions with Brian's shirt. I first put 1/2 of the spiral into the yellow. Then I rotated the shirt a quarter turn and put it in blue. Then I rotated it again and put it in red. This means some of the colors ended up overlapping to create orange and purple and green.

And I wonder why Brian's turned out the best?? :)

It was fun and not very messy! We'll probably do this activity again. I've gotten a kick out of how often Brian's worn his shirt.