Saturday was a lovely Spring day which meant we were able to use the garden for “messy” craft. This was perfect as my daughter had asked if we could make her a new bag for her PE kit over the holidays.
She’d bought a bag the last time we were in Hobbycraft as she knew I had a tie dye kit hiding in my craft cupboard. It was a Tulip One Step Kit similar to the picture but in Red, Fuchsia & Purple.
I’ve done single colour tie dying before but never multiple colours, so was quite excited to see how it would turn out.
The kit itself is straightforward to use. It supplies clear instructions, 2 pairs of gloves and a good number of rubber bands.
In addition to my daughter’s bag, a friend had given me 10 tote bags leftover from one of her projects. (I seem to end up as a general repository for craft items but to my husband’s relief items do get passed on)
We had a lot of fun scrunching, folding, wrapping with rubber bands and tying with string. We tried to make sure that no two bags were the same. A good example of synchronicity was that a tie-dying video had appeared in my Facebook feed the night before which gave us a few ideas.
The dye bottles require topping up with water and then you have 45 minutes to apply it.
We set to applying the dye to the prepared bags with the last bit of dye splatted on a flat bag
The work table had a layer of cling film which we used to wrap each bag after the dye was applied. We found a second layer was essential to contain the mess.
Speaking of mess, we soon found the gloves supplied got in the way, next time I’ll get some latex gloves.
Luckily most of the dye came off the same day with Humblestuff’s Soft Cleaning Paste coming to the rescue.
The bags are left for 8 hours. Then a quick rinse in the sink with cold water followed by a hot wash in the washing machine. Areas of bag which hadn’t fully taken the dye before the machine wash picked up the pink colour during that part of the process.
I’ve noticed that the specific colour pack we used is no longer available. I think the red and pink have merged and we lost some of the effects we were hoping for.
A couple of the bags might need further work, I am tempted to get another bigger dye pack with contrasting colours to see how it will turn out. Overall I am pleasantly surprised with our results as I wasn’t at all sure what we were going to get.
