4th of July Tye Dyed shirts

I always, every year just buy those 5 dollar shirts from Old Navy with the flag on them. But….this year I decided to make my girls some patriotic shirts. How hard could it be right? Well…after scouring pinterest for ideas I settled on trying some tye dying. The tutorial I found was great, pictures were awesome. But…my end result, well it was good but wasn’t near as cute as the original. My girls will still wear them because they are definitely not horrible, and because I worked so hard on them.

I thought, tye dying, easy and cheap, it can’t take a lot of time. I was partially correct. It was pretty cheap, I got the shirts at Wal Mart for 3.00, and the tulip shirt dye at JoAnns with a coupon so it was 6.00. It wasn’t hard at all, just mix the dye up and squirt it the shirts. But time consuming it was, and super messy. Or maybe I am just messy…hmmmm, not sure. All I know is it DID make a mess and rinsing the dye out of the shirts took FOREVER!

So, not a total pinterest FAIL, maybe we could call it a partial fail and maybe the reason for the partial fail is all me, it was my very first time experimenting with tye die!! Plus I tried to dye some polka dotted white fabric scraps to make hair accessories out of. Didn’t really work!

So, here is how it went.

First I bought the shirts and the dye in red and blue.

I bunched up the shirt and used regular zip ties to separate into 3 sections.

Mixed up the dye according to the directions and used the red on the top section, left the middle white and then blue on the bottom section.

The tutorial said to stay 1/2 inch from the zip tie when dying and I tried to and did not succeed because the dye just came out of the bottle so fast!

I used freezer paper (luv that stuff, so many uses) underneath my shirts when I dyed them to protect my tabletop. After you are done dying you have to wrap up your dye soaked shirts in plastic and let them sit for 6-8 hours. I wrapped in plastic and then just rolled the butcher paper around them and let them sit.

After waiting the soaking hours the directions said to rinse the dye out until the water runs clear. Sounds simple, but it took FOREVER! I rinsed and rinsed those shirts for almost 20 minutes and still the water wasn’t clear and I got irritated so I just washed them anyway.

After washing I needed to remove the zip ties and I ended up snipping little holes in each of the shirts just trying to get those dang things off!

The red top on the shirt turned partially orange and the white section wasn’t as big as I wanted. I ran a load of clothes through the washer after washing the shirts and some of the clothes got dye on them that must have been leftover from washing the tye dyed shirts. ugh!! so angry!!

The little scraps of fabric not so cute. The white polka dots stood out really well from the dyed fabric, but they just didn’t turn out like I had envisioned and I thought and thought and could not come up with a cute way to make a hair accessory out of them so I just threw them in the trash.

Tutorial pic of shirt.

My pic of the shirt I dyed.

See the difference, not horrible, but not great either! What do your kids wear for the 4th?

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