Tie Dye! (or Chicago for me)

The kids and I tried tie dye for the first time earlier this month and it turned out great.   I wanted to give it another go so I ordered supplies and had them sent directly to my dad's place.  Last weekend we all got to dye t-shirts and dish cloths.  It was definitely worth the mess (and blue fingernails).
George and Jack had a bit of experience so they knew what designs they wanted to try.  Jack calls his grey shirt "Lumberjack" because of the suspender-like stripes.  George's heart impressed all of us.   I could do this over and over.  I want to experiment more with single colors and maybe mixing my own colors?  I don't think I'm ready to try anything but the standard tulip dyes, but they do fade after a few washings so I need to figure out how to stop that from happening.  There are so many experiments I want to try.  Pretty soon we won't have anything to wear but tie dye..

These are the first attempts done in NY on 4th of July.  We applied dye right on the grass so our feet and knees got pretty colorful.  I liked how that allowed us to control the color placement though.  In the Chicago batch, we used a plastic sheet to work on and it allowed excess die to run and pool.  Many of our shirts have random spots of unintended color (blue on the bottoms of George's pink heart sleeves, green in the white "frame" I was trying to get on the heart sleeve tee).  Our feet were cleaner but the dye got everywhere.  I think I will try without the protective sheet next time.

 

And the batch from Chicago:

I realize that a few of these are pics have already been shared on instagram and facebook, but I am pretty fed up with main stream social media these days.  It all feels so... out of my control.  So I wanted to document life over here again.