Something that Amber and I started a few years ago was creating Fourth of July shirts for our annual barbeque. Last year we tried the classic way of doing tied dyed shirts, but they looked more like purple and pink instead of blue and white. Thankfully the guys didn’t mind the colors and were willing to let us try tie dying again this year. Last month when I was at Target getting the birthday bag for memory board I found some tie dying kits on sale and picked a few up. Each kit came with three bottles filled navy, turquoise, and red dye and all I needed to do was add water, seemed easy enough! I did a little research on the best way to tie dye and decided on what pattern we wanted. This year, since we are nerdy after all, decided to make Captain American tie dye shirts. The most important part of this design was the shield so we needed to make sure the colors didn’t bleed together. To get the best seal we read that we should use zip ties, who knew?! We zipped tied each shirt with four zip ties in the pattern of the shield. Next we damped each shirt since apparently wet shirts helps the dye to get to all of the areas of the shirt. We started with the red dye, following the instructions on the package and dyed only the designated red areas of the shield, once the red was finished we repeated the process with the blue. However, since the blue looked purple we mixed the blue and turquoise to get more of a royal blue color. We covered the shirts and let them seat for at least six hours like we had read to let the dye set.
After the six hours, we rinsed the dye out being care to let the blue run over only the blue and the red only over the red. Once the water started to run clear, we cut off the zip ties and washed and dried in washing machine and dryer. The last step was to create the star in the center of the shirt. To do this I cut out a star in four pieces of wax paper, then taping them to shirts. I used a white fabric spray paint that was the same texture as puff paint. I sprayed each star in two small coats to prevent them from getting runny or bubbly. I waited a few hours for the stars to dry before removing the wax paper, just in time for our annual barbeque!
