December finishes III - Tie Dye

This Christmas my tie-dye aspirations were ambitious. Normally I only tie-dye towels for one set of nieces and nephews. But this year I am mailing them to the El Paso crowd and also making them for the Everett offspring. Then I also wanted to make some shirts for my sister, and when I went to fetch the dye supplies, I found a few things I had set aside to dye when I got around to it.

I found a couple of pillowcases that I had bought for my camping trip in September. I made sure to get white cotton so that I could tie-dye them later. The colors are the Dharma Trading Company Fall 2015 palette.

These are a couple of shirts that used to be white. Left is mine and right is my husband's. I love these colors, also from the Fall 2015 selection.

This is the shirt I made for my sister using the same colors. She better not be reading this and she better love it.

Here are six of the towels. I added the bright blue ("sky") and lime green.

Here's a composite picture of all the towels. I was worried at first because the wet dye was very dark. Also, the twelve towels were arranged on the table together and were hard to saturate. Normally my tie-dye doesn't have any white left in it, but there was no way I was going to get through all the towel fabric. I had soaked it in soda ash in the washing machine and then used the spin cycle to get the excess water out. This left the towels a little too dry. But in the end it worked out very well. I don't think these would have been as spectacular without the white.