Tie-Dye with your kids!

Happy Friday!!!  I hope everyone has had a great week.  It was Spring Break for my kids this week and since we were going to be stuck at home I was a little worried about how the week would go.  At least during our school weeks half of the day is taken up with school work, but this week actually went by really fast. We kept ourselves entertained around here and managed to squeeze in some fun activities, too!

One thing that we all loved doing was tie-dye!!!!  Now, it is a MESS, but totally worth it and we all had a lot of fun.  I did a tie-dye birthday party for my daughter a few years ago and learned a lot during that process.  If you are looking for a fun activity I would totally recommend doing some tie-dye at home with your kids.
I bought this tie-dye kit on Amazon for under $15. It comes in a bunch of different colors and some are available right away, but others are not going to be available until a few weeks. I also found kits by the same brand HERE and HERE. These kits come with all of the dye, plastic gloves, and rubber bands needed to make the different designs.

I ordered a few packs of white t-shirts (these do shrink!) and also some plain white sweatshirts (only $8) for us to dye.  The directions say to wash all of the items you are going to tie-dye so I did that the day before. Then it was time to prep our shirts. I set up a table outside and the girls and I cut some of our shirts to make tank tops, crop tops (them, not me!), and I distressed my sweatshirt.


Then we looked up ideas online for how to fold, twist, swirl, and tie up the shirts.  After we got all the shirts done we were ready to dye. I used plastic bins and would 100% recommend finding something around the house you could put the shirts in before putting the dye on.  Plastic tubs, a bowl or something like that.  After each shirt was done I put it in a plastic bag with their name on it and we would rinse the containers out so the color didn't absorb into their next shirt.


This is definitely an outdoor activity. It made a huge mess inside and I can't imagine doing this indoors.  My kids were pretty good about keeping the color on the shirts, but we had a few mishaps here and there and my hands ended up looking tie-dyed in the end!


The directions say to let the shirts sit for 6-8 hours, but we left ours in the bags for 24 hours.  The next step is to rinse out all of the excess color.  This takes WAY longer than you would imagine.  My kids like doing a lot of the dye!  The last time we did this I rinsed the shirts in my laundry room sink, but this time I decided to let the kids help do it outside with a hose.  It took a lot of spraying/rinsing/squeezing. We all got totally soaked and at one point my son went to put on a bathing suit.  They had a blast!


Once the water is mostly clean it is finally it was time to take the rubber bands off and see how our designs turned out!  This is the MOST fun part because I feel like you never know what it will look like!


The last step is to wash each of the items in hot water. I washed in groups of like colors because there is still some bleeding of the colors that happen.  We couldn't be happier with how all of ours turned out.  I was most surprised about my sweatshirt because I was expecting it to just be green and white. However, it turned out to be this really pretty green and teal color.  Never could have planned that if I tried!