Sunshine Daydream: Tie Dye for Tots

We took advantage of Nona's backyard on our recent trip to Brigantine to do a few crafts that aren't very feasible in the city.  First up was some tie dying!  Mom got this great kit -- it seemed pretty reasonably priced for an all-in-one place to start.  It came with some great DVD directions, which would be good to watch in advance because it turns out you need to wash the material you want to dye first and that could have been done ahead of time.  But, mom washed our stuff up and prepared the dye (which was really easy because the kit came with pre-measured squirt bottles, including one extra to mix a custom color).  We did this out back in Nona's yard on garbage bags spread out on the lawn.  It was the perfect spot because we could wash away the dye that spilled easily AND, this is key key key, it has an outdoor shower that has hot water.  You need hot water to do the rinse process, which is pretty messy.

I was pretty antsy to get at those bottles of color, but I had to wait a bit while mom did the folding and rubber-banding.  She tried to get me to help out with the "scrunched" one, but I really wasn't interested.  After mom finished that up, they had to soak in the soda ash water for just a bit and then WATCH OUT - I was all over those puppies.  I got to dye several shirts for myself, some tanks for Cami, and Grandpa D-Rock donated two of his seemingly endless supply of "Big Dog" shirts for me to work on.  I ended up using almost all of the dye from two kits (enough to dye about 75 shirts apparently!  it would appear that much of the dye ended up on me and mom, too).  Mom looked a little skeptical when all of the shirts looked black, but we put them in plastic bags and let them sit for 24 hours.  When mom rinsed them, we were really amazed to see how cool they turned out - they are awesome!  After a quick wash, they were all ready and we wore them the rest of the week.  And our hands, knees, legs and feet eventually faded - good thing the only place we had to go was the beach!

Pretty sweet.

Not so sweet, but no biggie.