With lockdown in the UK now reaching it's 11th week, and me personally now reaching my correlating 11th week of unemployment (let's not even talk about it), I've had to get creative with the daytime activities.
One of the ways I have spent my copious amount of free time is online shopping, and through my hours spent trawling websites, it has come to my attention that at the moment, tie dye seems to be very 'in'. However, due to my lack of job, and therefore distinct lack of funds (thanks for bringing it up again), I have had to think outside the box to keep up with the ever-changing fashion trends. So I decided to get creative and do an afternoon of DIY tie dying with my sister.
Here's how it went.
First, we ordered a bottle of dye off Amazon. DIY tie dying seems to be all the range at the moment, and the brand everyone seems to be going for is Dylon, so we decided to follow the crowd and ordered a packet of the Dylon fabric dye in the colour 'Ocean Blue'. We paid £7.50 for it, but I think we could have got it cheaper if we had done a little more digging, or were willing to wait for a later delivery date.
We then headed to our local supermarket and picked up some plain white tops. We just went for some super cheap ones in case the tie dye looked atrocious.
Then we sprayed some water on the t-shirts to get them damp, but not soaking. We laid them out, then started to prepare the dye. We found a set of instructions online that said to mix the dye with 500ml of water, and 250g of ordinary salt (to be honest, we had no idea about the purpose or need for the salt, but we went with it anyway!). We didn't want to use the entire pot of dye, so we just added 10-15 teaspoons of of the powder.
(At this stage, we also realised we had no elastic bands so had to take a very speedy trip to the shops ✌🏻)
Once back from the shops, we laid the damp t-shirts flat and then twisted small segments of the fabric and tied the sections with elastic bands. We ended up creating about 10 different sections, and then pulled the whole fabric tight together with more elastic bands.
We then poured the dye into a squirty bottle to make it easier to apply to the garment, and started coating the t-shirt in dye. We basically kept going until the entire top was blue.
TOP TIP: Initially, we only squirted the outside of the t-shirt, and when we later untied it, there was basically no actual tie dye. So we ended up tying it back up with elastic bands and giving a second coating. This time, we pulled the scrunched fabric apart and tried to squirt down into the middle to make sure the entire top was covered in the tie dye effect.
We then left the t-shirts to soak up the dye for about an hour!
When we returned, we kept the top scrunched up in the elastic bands and ran it under cold water, squeezing it until the water eventually ran clear. Then we untied all the bands, and put it into the washing machine on a warm wash. We dried it over night, and in the morning this was the final product!
Hope this has been useful, and I would love to see some other DIY projects you have been doing during lockdown!