Tie Dye Summer Fun

My oldest son and I are spending our first summer home together this year! In the past I had a full time job so summer was just another part of the year. Now that I gave up the job to be a full time mom and blogger, we actually get to hang out together and have a TRUE summer break!

I’ve been trying to come up with fun things for us to do all summer, and one of the first things I thought of was tie dye. That was a fun summer staple for me when I was younger! I thought we would have a blast not only playing with the actual tie dye, but coming up with things to apply the tie dye to!

My friends at I Love to Create sent me an awesome giant Tulip Tie-Dye Kit with 12 colors! It comes with everything you need to tie dye including dye in bottles, gloves, rubber bands, and some awesome directions that include a lot of tie dye styles and how to’s.

All you need to provide are the whites to be dyed!

They also sent me a very cool Spray Tie-Dye Kit that we’re going to bring out later this summer.

We spent a couple of weeks shopping around for items to tie dye. Whenever we were out and about we kept an eye out for the perfect whites. We ended up with t-shirts (of course!), child aprons, a bandanna, a tote bag, and fabric.

We wrapped all of the whites with rubber bands first following various directions from the kit, and a few where we just completely made up the design. Then we filled the bottles with water as instructed and shook the fire out of them to dissolve the colored powdered. My little helper loved the shaking part! It was a great way to get him involved with the prep work. He also helped select the tie-dye designs we used.

We spread a drop cloth outside in the grass and got to work!

We started with the t-shirts. I found that with the shirts the dye tended bead up on the fabric and needed encouragement (rubbed in) to truly absorb. This made it difficult for my little helper to work, so I had him pick out colors as we used them while I rubbed them into the fabric.

The aprons were the complete opposite of the shirts and readily absorbed the dye. But by then my little helper was having a blast being in charge of color selection and decided to keep that job!

The fabric also readily absorbed the dye with no extra effort. I picked up a yard of nice white cotton at Joann’s and told my boys I would make them some tie dye shorts out of it. Since I successfully sewed my first pair a couple of months ago, I thought I would give it a try again.

I also had an unbleached cotton remnant in my fabric stash and dyed that as well and plan to make some fun small things with it.

I love that we kicked off our first summer together with a bang!

We have already made some fun memories and souvenirs that we can wear all summer long.

Be sure to check out all of the fun tie dye ideas at Tie Dye Your Summer!

You can also find a list of all the stores that carry the Tulip tie dye kits there.