The last week of school Charlotte’s class did some tie dye techniques. Ever since I let her have one of my GOOD white shirts (it was last minute and she needed something!) and it turned out amazing, we have been obsessed with tie dying. Polos, t-shirts, tanks, socks! You name it, we are wanting to throw some colors at it and see what turns out. The best thing about tie dye is its one of those crafts that just gives back to you. It has all the right elements- color and little direction.
The problem now is that we want to tie dye ALL the white in the house. It’s a sickness. There are a lot of fun ways you can dye things. You can ice tie dye, you can twist your rubber bands up to make shapes, you can just throw dye at it and see what happens, you can put in a spray bottle, drip bottle, paint brush- really any way you can get the dye from the bottle to the clothing will work. In this case, we decided to Water Gun Tie Dye. It’s a lot sillier than a spray bottle and we have hoards of these things laying around.
When it comes to picking dye for your shirts there are a lot of choices out there. I personally just buy the tie dye kits
cause our local JoAnn Fabrics is going out of business and has them on sale for super cheap. The kits usually come with rubber bands, gloves, and a variety of tie dye colors. In this case, we had some dye from a kit we did last week (blues) and these pinks/oranges below.
I picked out a white sun dress I had in the closet and we went for it.
Water Gun Tie Dye
Trash the dress! We trashed the summer dress and you can too!
Need
- dress (or shirt- whatever. Don’t pick a crappy piece of clothing .The nicer the clothing, the more fun you will have repurposing and wearing it.)
- Tie Dye Kit
- Water Guns
First, prep your dye. Dye does exactly what you think…it dyes. If you get this on your hands, it’s going to be on there a day or two. If this bothers you, put on the gloves, even before mixing. It has an uncanny way of getting out of the bottle. Once the dye is prepped, you can easily squeeze into all the water guns. Each gun was loaded with dye prior to use.
Tip: Get small water guns, not big nerf soakers. You can only load so much dye and larger guns require full chambers to work.
Second, have a parent spray out some of the dye to make sure it’s working correctly. Then aim at the dress and go at it! We didn’t worry too much about a design or if the colors were running. You can see our results below.
