Origami Revisited

Recently I wrote about how I was experimenting with origami paper and pushpins to come up with new tie-dye patterns. I had tied one design according to the paper pattern, but I hadn't gotten around to dyeing it yet:


This was the pattern I was (sort of) aiming for:


I finally got around to dyeing the bedsheet I had folded, and here is the result:

I didn't get quite enough dye into all the folds, so there is a bit more white than I would like, but you can see that the pattern actually came out quite a bit like the paper one!

Of course, if I have a tie-dyed top sheet, I need to dye the rest of the sheet set to match. So I folded and tied up the fitted sheet semi-randomly (that is, no particular plan but similar folding techniques), and it came out like this:

Here is the matching pillowcase:

I had a couple hand towels and washcloths handy, so I dyed them too:

One disadvantage of all-cotton sheet sets is that they wrinkle like crazy. Since I'm still practicing my "done is better than perfect" policy, I haven't bothered to iron them. But these pictures get the idea across, and my kids don't care--they've already started arguing over who should get these sheets!

Origami Paper, Tie-dye, and Birthday Parties

I first started doing tie-dye six years ago, when my older daughter wanted a tie-dye theme for her sixth-birthday party. I did some reading, a friend pointed out the Dharma website, I got some supplies, I tried it out a couple of weeks in advance, it came out well, and I was hooked.

Since then I've helped about a thousand people do tie-dye: more than 500 first graders, a couple of Girl Scout troops, several birthday and other parties, my class for middle schoolers, several kids' day camp and family camp sessions, three corporate team-building events, and lots of random sessions with friends. I love doing tie-dye as a hobby, but I'm actually more interested in teaching it to other people. I have no interest in doing it as a production-and-craft-fairs profession--Harmony can do a much better job, and I recognize their distinctive work on people all over town.

I've mentioned before how I like to sneak in a little education when I teach people how to do tie-dye. Math, spatial skills, and so on. They get practice in colors and manual dexterity. And of course I think doing tie-dye is good for the soul, too. No, buying the mass-market tie-dye t-shirts at the local big-box store doesn't count.

Origami (paper folding) and kirigami (paper cutting) are similar crafts that exercise those same mental and physical "muscles". I did lots of origami as a kid, and I loved it. I've also done some kirigami; those paper snowflakes I did in school were just the beginning. True, you don't end up with the same wearable results as with tie-dye (including shibori), but visualizing how the project is going to turn out is half the fun for all three crafts, as is the pleasure (for me) of folding materials precisely.

Lately I've been playing with origami paper as a quick and concrete way to visualize how various folds might come out in tie-dye. The basic paper is cheap, thin, colorful, and easy to fold (I get 60 sheets for $1.50 USD at the local Daiso store). I've been folding it up in various wedges, squares, or rectangles, then piercing it in patterns using a push-pin into a small block of firm packaging foam. I particularly like the foam that feels a little soft and waxy (not Styrofoam/polystyrene), but anything you can easily push a pin into will work fine.


I put the resulting pierced "snowflakes" up on a window so I can see the light pattern through them (dark paper colors work best), and they are very pretty.


My kids joined in, of course, producing some beautiful ones of their own. My younger daughter folded her paper in random directions before piercing it, and she came out with some very intriguing designs.

These paper creations were so easy, so fun, so cheap, and so clean (no cut-out pieces to sweep up!) that I added them to the activities roster for my younger daughter's ninth birthday party (a crafts theme, naturally) a couple weeks ago. It was a definite hit with most of the kids. For the goody bags (party favors), I sent home the foam blocks and push-pins the kids used, along with a fresh packet of origami paper for each child, in hope that they might do some more later and keep flexing those brains.

Now I'm starting to work on translating a few of those paper designs into tie-dye.


I'm using the fold-along-a-drawn-line technique shown in both of my favorite DVDs about tie-dye:

• "Learn How to Tie Dye: Complete 3 Volume Set" available from Dharma or Amazon
• "The Art of Tie-Dye" available from Dharma or Amazon

Sometimes I'm stitching the designs with dental floss, sometimes I'm just tying the designs without stitching. The more complex designs need to be stitched so they don't slip apart.

I haven't dyed any of these yet, and they won't come out exactly like the paper patterns, but I'll post them when I do. In the meantime, try out some paper pattern piercing!

Did Galileo Do Tie-Dye?

I spent the whole day today doing one of the things I enjoy most: teaching tie-dye to lots of kids.

I was at my daughter's summer camp, Galileo Summer Quest, which is a new program here for middle school kids. It's not "school", but it's a seriously educational program. Kids spend time doing things like learning how to make digital movies (from storyboards to shooting to editing on the computer) and learning leadership and collaboration skills. They also spend a period of each day doing more recreational activities like playing extreme hopscotch and foursquare--that's where the tie-dye comes in (besides, it is camp!).

Galileo Summer Quest is a great camp for nerd kids--or kids whose parents want them to be nerd kids! Or both, in my daughter's case--(wipes away tear)--I'm SO proud! I'm a nerd too, of course. But the question arises: is there anything educational and intellectual about tie-dye?

Absolutely! In my pre-dye lectures to the middle schoolers, I manage to sneak in just a little brain work. There's a little botany/biology: the Procion dyes bond to the cellulose in the cotton shirts, and where can you find cellulose? Cell walls in plants. There is a little chemistry in the reaction of the dyes with the soda ash (a basic solution) and the cellulose. And there is math: we spend time talking about how folds relate to the lines of symmetry, and how the stripes of colors relate to the folding, in the final design. We did X, V, stripe, and diamond designs. The kids (and counselors) really have to apply their spatial skills to wrap their heads around how the diamond and the X patterns come from almost the same folds.

Who knew tie-dye was so intellectual? Galileo would be proud.

Rhapsody in Many Colors

Today I had my now-annual tie-dyeing day with the current crop of first graders at my local school. I do this project in four sessions:

1. Measurement day: the kids measure each others' seated height (seat to shoulder) and waist size. We also look at the t-shirt sizes the kids are currently wearing. This gives me the data I need to order the shirts from Dharma. More importantly, it also gives the kids a little experience with measurement. First grade is is when most of them are just learning what a inch is. I can now pretty much tell a kid's t-shirt size by eye anyhow, and most of them are size 10-12s so they can still wear the shirts next year. I ordered 84 size 10-12s, about a dozen each of 6-8's and 14-16's, and 6 adult M. I often have one or two kids who take an adult L, partly because they like their shirts big.
2. Tying day: about two weeks later I have all the shirts and have prewashed them. I go in and teach the kids the fold for stripes, X's, and diamonds (see this picture in my previous post). With the help of teachers and some parent volunteers, the kids all fold their shirts and tie them with 4-7 rubber bands. I leave the shirts in the classroom for the week.
3. Dyeing day: this is the most work but also the most fun. I explain to the kids how to mix colors together on the shirts (I give them six colors to choose from), how to hold the squeeze bottles, how to check that they got dye on the inside of the folded shirt, behavior rules, and so on. Then an army of parents and other volunteers suit the kids up in gloves, goggles, and a garbage-bag smock, guides them to their soda-ash-soaked shirts, and supervises the dyeing process. The kids love this part!




4. Shirt return day: a few of the parents take the shirts home to wash over the weekend. We time the whole project so the kids get their shirts back right before the final school assembly of the school year. I just love watching the kids show each other their results: "I love my shirt! I love my shirt!" It's so cool to see the entire first grade in the front of the assembly in their shirts. It's an amazing swath of color.

Behind the scenes, it's an amazing amount of work. I mix about 9 gallons of dye (6 colors), 12 gallons of soda ash solution, make 80 or so trash bag smocks, collect table coverings, order and prewash shirts, and so on. And of course there is washing out afterwards and lots of cleanup. But that's all stuff I can do at my leisure, at my own pace.

It's all the volunteer help that really makes it work and makes it a really fun experience. First graders aren't terribly patient about waiting in line for getting suited up or doing their dyeing. So we have half a dozen people swarm the kids quickly, popping garbage bags over heads and slipping on gloves and goggles. Other volunteers are waiting at the dye tables. With this effort, it goes very quickly, and we got through four batches of 20+ kids today in three hours! Of course, the cleanup took another few hours...

Review of Tulip Tie-Dye Kit

At one point I was planning to teach a regularly-scheduled tie-dye course for a local craft store. That didn't work out, but the plan was that I was going to have to use the products they carried in the store. You know, teach classes at the store to encourage students to buy the store's products (dyes, white stuff) . Sounds good, but the store doesn't carry the products I usually use! So some trials were in order to see if I could come up with a class worth teaching using their available products. The short answer is "yes, but..."

The Adventure Begins

The store carries a line of Tulip "One-Step Tie-Dye Kit" brand kits made by Duncan. It comes in several different groups of colors , such as "Classic" (yellow, fuchsia, turquoise), "Vibrant", and so on. I used the Classic colors.

The kit consists of three teeny little plastic squirt bottles, each containing about half an inch of dye powder, a pair of really cheap plastic gloves that appear to be made of plastic wrap, a small handful of rubber bands (maybe a dozen), and an instruction sheet (which contains English, Spanish, and French instructions, so only about 1/4 of the glossy page is useful to me).

Nowhere on the package or instruction sheet could I find any mention of what type of dye the kit contains, but the website says it's Procion dye. There is no soda ash packet in the box, so I assume the soda ash fixer is mixed into the dye powder in the bottles. The extra little paper notice tucked into the box says to make sure to use the dye within 30 minutes of adding water (the glossy instruction sheet says 45), so I take that as confirmation that the soda ash is in the bottles with the dye. Normally I would have the soda ash separate, because then you don't have to use all the dye right away. But at least it's the right kind of dye!

Next comes the white stuff. I'm used to getting a wide variety of cotton things from Dharma, but the challenge is to get stuff from the craft store! Well, they have a line of t-shirts from Jerzees. The shirts are fairly cheap, about $2.50 on special sale, but they are made of 50% cotton and 50% polyester. Wait, I find a 100% cotton shirt mixed in with the others, also from Jerzees. But it's from a different part of the rack, and costs about 7 dollars! Ouch. I get one of those and a few of the cotton/poly blend shirts.

Now the Work Starts

I washed and dried all but one of the shirts in detergent with no softener or dryer sheets, as is my usual habit. I wanted to dye one shirt (a cotton/poly shirt) unwashed to see if that made any difference. I folded and banded all of the shirts (dry), to make an X, two diamonds, and a swirl.

I added the water to the 3 bottles as directed and shook them up. I then took about half an inch of dye from each of those bottles and used it to make up three more bottles (same sized bottles, which I already had around) of those colors, diluted with more water. This second set of diluted dyes is not part of the kit instructions, but I figured that since I tend to go through a lot of dye I should stretch it as best as I could.

I usually dye pieces while they are wet from being soaked in soda ash. In this case, the shirts were all completely dry, and the dye had a tendency to bead up and roll somewhere I didn't want it. I had to jam the tip of the bottle onto the fabric to get the dye to stay put. That's not so much because of the particular kit so much as it's the particular process with the soda ash mixed into the dyes. Next time I'd try it with damp shirts from the washer.

Results

I managed to dye four t-shirts with the six little bottles of dye, and I had enough left over to dye a pair of socks (okay, so those weren't from the craft store!). Here they are:


Can you spot the cotton shirt? It's the X. The colors are definitely more vibrant and "popping" on the cotton shirt than they are on the cotton/poly shirts.

[Lacey, tie-dye hound that she is, can't resist pointing out the cotton shirt... she sees me laying out tie-dye on a blanket to take pictures, and she's right there in the middle, posing!]

For this X, I folded the shirt in quarters, then accordion pleated diagonally from the center to the outer corners. I used the full-strength dyes in sections on one edge of the pleats, and the diluted dyes in the same sections on the edges of the other side. That's what gives it the dark-light-dark effect, which is especially noticeable in the turquoise stripes.

It's hard to see in these photos, but the dyes spread differently on the cotton than they did on the cotton/poly. Remember that I applied the dye to dry, washed t-shirts. On the cotton, the dye tended to stop spreading and not blend quite so much. On the cotton/poly, the dyes tended to spread out more and blend more, giving a more "smeared" effect as seen in the diamond shirt below. Close up, the cotton/poly also has a more "heathered" appearance because the white polyester fibers don't pick up the dye. This diamond shirt is the one cotton/poly shirt that I did not wash before dyeing.


The diamond pattern is folded the same way as the X, except the pleats are folded on the other diagonal, from the underarm to the neck.

Here is the other diamond shirt (cotton/poly). It looks more faded mostly because the majority of the shirt (the outer sections) were dyed with the diluted dyes. That's the opposite of what I did with the first diamond, which is more faded in the middle.


The only difference I can see between the pre-washed and unwashed cotton/poly shirts is that the pre-washed shirt is pilling more than the unwashed shirt, having been through the washer an extra time. That's one reason I usually avoid cotton/poly blend shirts--they pill like crazy, so they just don't feel as good to wear.

Here is the swirl shirt (cotton/poly). Notice again how the colors sort of smear together. I like the visible difference between the full-strength and diluted yellows here.


Comments

I liked the fact that the water-adding instructions were printed right on the bottles. Once I had gloves on, it was hard to handle the instruction sheet.

The instruction sheet provided lots of good ideas, but not enough "meat" on how to actually do some of those ideas. A lot of the space was taken up with the Spanish and French versions, so there wasn't much space left in any of the languages for more in-depth instructions.


Since there is no measuring and almost no mixing for the dyes, it's really easy to use. And because the soda ash is right in with the dye, you don't need a separate bucket or container for soaking the shirts before dyeing (and no dripping mess from moving the wet shirts around).

Like many craft kits, the actual quantity of materials (dye) provided is pretty limited, so it's not good for more than one or two people (and definitely not the hardcore "let's-dye-the-couch" types that I hang out with!). At about $10 for the three-color Classic kit I got, this is definitely not the most cost-effective way to do tie-dye (see my blog entry on resources). The box says the kit is good for "up to 8 projects", but I didn't even get close, even after diluting some of the dye.

These tie-dye kits are marketed towards young teenage girls, as shown by the picture on the boxes. For one or two girls doing a kit session on an otherwise dull afternoon, this is a great kit to have on hand (along with a couple of cotton t-shirts). It's also good for a first try at tie-dye on your own. For anything more than that, get a bigger tie-dye kit from Dharma or put together your own.