Dye Job

Last night we made 30 tie-dyed tee-shirts for the kids attending Harry's birthday party on Sunday. Lots of work, but great fun (when you don't have a toddler accidentally shoving a box of liquid dyes off the kitchen counter). Three cheers for ugly, indestructible linoleum.

Rather than another round of rainbows, we experimented with two and three-color spiral. They came out great. The smaller the shirt, the harder the effort to get the spirals tight. These are not the Ritt dyes we all grew up with. These are the powdered dyes you activated with TSP, all chemicals that the kids can't play with, at least not yet. All of the work is done wearing gloves. Still, I have an orange thumb.

People have asked how we do it, so here goes:

First we use a surgical clamp affixed to the center of the shirt to twist it into a tight spiral that looks a lot like a tuna can. We secure it with four rubber bands. Then the shirt is soaked in a bucket of water-diluted soda ash (which will help fix the colors). Once squeezed out, we use plastic bottles to apply the dye in pie-like sections. Each shirt is then encased in plastic wrap and left overnight to set. This morning we hand-washed each shirt (think: woman banging clothes against stone at your local riverbank) until the excess color had been diluted. Then each shirt goes through the wash, twice. Sounds more labor-intensive than it is...except for the sheer volume of shirts. All the dyes are available online if you want to give it a go. We favor the cotton in the Hanes tagless tees.

The shirts are fun to wear (so says Harry) and great to have as a parent when you don't want to lose sight of your kid in a crowd. They're also a great alternative to smocks when you go to art class.

A note to the infants who are not reading this blog: if you're not a walker yet, you won't be getting a shirt, sorry. But you will have your sibling's rainbow hand-me-down to help mom and dad spot you at the mall.