Chaotic Colors

Hello, I’m back and my dying experience has been great! I’ve learned a lot about tie dye and I was so excited to put my skills to work this time. I tried a new approach and I am very worried to how it will end up. However the book has taught me something about being bold in your dying moves. "The best way to learn about tie dye is to be hands on" (Simon-Alexander 68). Instead of following on simple technique, I meshed a few together. I did a slight copy of both the twisting technique and the crunching technique. I have high hopes that this will create a funky pattern that brings the colors to life.

t shirt after rubber bands are applied

Now time for color application. This was messy and a great amount of fun. I didn’t apply this in any sort of pattern. It was just a chaotic spurt of color everywhere. "sometimes the best method is to put the color on randomly" (Simon-Alexander 86). I had three bottles of color and I used all of them, my shirt may have had more color on it than appropriate, but I’m hoping that will make the colors much brighter. After all of my color was applied my shirt was a ball of dripping color. In my opinion it was beautiful in an abstract messy kind of way. Now it was time to clean up.

Cleaning up wasn’t easy, I got tie dye on my carpet. However my carpet is already very stained due to hair dye, so I wasn’t too devastated by this. I had saturated many towels with hair dye, so in a way I dyed many things today. I finished cleaning and I set my shirt aside to saturate overnight.

The final product of my shirt is great. It’s very vibrant and the patterns and color came out nicely. If I had to do this again the only thing I would change would be how long I let the shirt sit. I didn’t let it sit overnight but rather for about 6 hours. Other than that I would do everything the same.

Q: what type of tie dye method would you chose?