Friday 20 July 2012

Tie-Dye Rainbow Swirls

I love anything tie dyed and have lots of clothes & accessories covered in the print so thought it was about time I - tried - to get my own tie-dye on before my festival season starts at Secret Garden Party this weekend. I've never tie-dyed or even dyed any of my clothes so was preparing for a colourful disaster.. but practice makes perfect..

I watched a few tutorials on youtube and read some instructables to find out exactly what was needed and headed down to Berwick Street in Soho to get all the equipment. I bought 1x1 metre of cotton to make the cape from one of the many fabric shops down there (cant remember which one, cost about £10) then went to Cowling & Wilcox to buy all the squeezy bottles (£1 each), elastic bands, and lots of Dylon dye (£3 each), the colours I used are Flamingo Pink, Sunflower Yellow, China Blue, Goldfish Orange and Intense Violet.. the primary colours mix so you don't really need to buy colours like orange, green and purple as if you overlap the yellows, blues and pink/reds the colours change... like the green on my cape. I didn't know this until after I had bought all the dye... but if you do buy the secondary colours they do come out brighter if you apply them directly onto the fabric rather than mixing to make them..

Once I had twisted my cotton into a pie and tied it up with elastic bands to create 6 sections, I put all the colours on each section of the pie.. yellow, orange, blue, pink, purple and blue & yellow mixed (green).... I then put the dyed, cotton pie into a plastic bag and left it for about 12 hours to soak in...

The exciting part is taking it all out of the elastic bands and opening it all up to find swirly rainbow loveliness.. once the cotton sheet had all dried I folded it and cut a semi circle hole so that it can go over my head ready & on ready to festival dance around in... :) x

These are the videos & instructions I followed, enjoy! 


x




2 comments:

  1. hiya - great tie dye tips. what ratio of dye to water did you use in the bottles?

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  2. hello, glad you found them useful, I only used a small but of dye in the bottles pictured, maybe about 5cm high, then filled the rest of the bottle up to the top pretty much xx

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