Sharpie Tie Dye

The website I got my instructions from is here. When I was growing up we used to make tie dye shirts a lot. I loved it. It was messy, but fun to feel like you created your own shirt and it was awesome to see how each turned out differently. When I saw this idea of making a tie dye shirt using sharpie markers, I thought it was super awesome and wanted to try it with my girls.

 

Supplies :

-Sharpie or permanent Bic markers

-Rubber bands

-Rubbing Alcohol

-Eyedropper

-Plastic cup

-Pre-washed white shirt

-a piece of cardboard

 Before I started I sort of thought out where it might look good to have the circles of tie dye. I saw some ideas that had the entire shirt covered in tie dye circles and then they put an iron one decal over the top, which was cute too. I had never done this before so I just sort of guessed at how I wanted to do this. I put a piece of cardboard on the inside of the shirt so our color wouldn't leak to the back of the shirt, then I put a plastic cup (mine was a little big, but worked fine) inside the shirt and placed it where I wanted to start our first tie dye coloring spot and pulled the shirt tight over the cup and placed a rubber band around the cup. A very helpful hint I read about said not to use any complimentary colors together in the same circle or the colors would bleed and make the color turn to brown. This took some thinking to coordinate my colors and remember what complimentary colors were. So here are the colors you DON'T want together in the same circle: red and green, orange and blue, yellow and purple. It also said to only color in the center of the circle of the cup space and not on the edges of the inside of the circle. One of my daughter drew full on pictures and did lots of coloring in and the colors got muddy looking because there was too much coloring. My other daughter drew designs and less lines and less coloring in and hers turned out better, I thought. After they were done coloring a spot, I would use the dropper to put 10+ drops of rubbing alcohol (it said you might have to have 91% rubbing alcohol but mine was way lower % than that and it worked just fine) onto the coloring. You can watch the colors spread and change. I used as many drops as I needed to make sure that the colors were blending. Once it was done spreading (a minute or two). I would move the cup to our next spot and do that process all over again.

I did leave one cup under part of our finished shirt just so the color wouldn't bleed to the back, even though we had the cardboard in between.

 Here are the finished shirts. The one on the right is the one I thought turned out better with less coloring and more just designs. I didn't tell them what to draw, they just did whatever they felt like. They were sad when we were finished because they wanted to do more and were having fun with it. I had wished that I had bought more plain white shirts because they would have totally made another one if I had one. After we were done I put the shirts in the dryer to set the colors.

 The only part of this that I considered a miserable failure was the fact that the shirts I bought were TOTALLY the wrong size. I bought size 4-6 and should have realized they looked too big. Apparently there were some woman's 4-6 sized shirts sitting with the kids 4-6 shirts at Wal-mart???? :(  I was sad because they really was just way too big to wear right now. Oh well, it was still a fun project.