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.

New Life for Old Stuff

I'm really into the whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" thing. When I first learned it, though, it was called "don't waste perfectly good stuff" (and some people called it "just being cheap").

I really hate to throw out a perfectly good pair of jeans just because my husband has worn keyholes through the back pocket or had an ink pen explode in the depths of his front pocket. Hey! Those still have perfectly usable fabric on them!

And then there are the really expensive jeans you find at trendy stores like Abercrombie and Fitch, with all the strategically-placed rips, worn spots and, I'm expecting to see any day soon, burn holes in them. And you pay extra for that! Hey! I've thrown out jeans in better shape than that!

Anyway, I digress (and I rant ;-) ).

So besides hating to waste stuff, I have this other affliction called "being a packrat". I diligently save all the old jeans, worn out socks and socks without matches, old curtains I always hated anyhow, and so on. But every so often, some of that stuff comes in handy!

Recently it has been pretty cold outside. Well, at least what a native Californian considers cold, such as 40 degrees Fahrenheit... A friend has a particularly drafty door to his apartment, so I made him a draft stopper, also known as a "draft dodger" or "draft snake". It was a simple, fun project. It even allowed me to combine tie-dye with recycling!

I tie-dyed some old, dead jeans (mens), and I cut fabric from the legs (2 pieces, each 21" x 8"). I specifically cut the fabric so the ends of the finished tube would be the hems of the jeans legs, which I wanted to show. I sewed the two pieces together to make one 40"-long strip, which I then sewed into a long tube, and sewed one end shut. All my seams are double seams, by the way, to make sure the stuffing stays in.

Then it was time to stuff it! The moment I'd been waiting for! Packrat vindication was at hand! I gathered up those old socks (hey, they were clean), the remaining scraps of the jeans, ripped t-shirts and such, and cut them up into small pieces (2-3"-long pieces of socks, for example). I stuffed the draft stopper very firmly, since it needs to be heavy enough to stay in place against a door with wind blowing underneath it. A draft snake can swallow a surprisingly large number of socks!

I sewed the second end closed and put decorative ties on each end (made from more jeans scraps). Here is the finished product:


Amazingly enough, it worked! I like the way the tie-dye stripes give it a more snake-like appearance. Then another friend liked it and wanted one too. Yay! Another sock-eating snake! This time, it also became a machine-sewing lesson for my daughter, as well as a recycling project. She cut and sewed this one the same as the first one, except we left off the ties. Here is a picture of the second draft snake.


I really like the blues and greens on this one. So did my daughter, who was reluctant to give it up, even though she had made it specifically for our friend. Another project...

Reduce, reuse, recycle... and tie-dye!

What Do I Need and Where Do I Get It? Tie-Dye Resources

It's always nice to have some lists handy of where to get stuff.

Dyes

• The key thing here: if you are doing tie-dye on cotton (or some other natural fibers), use Procion-MX dyes (several suppliers offer their own brands of Procion-MX dyes). Never never never use "all-purpose" dyes like RIT that are available in supermarkets and craft stores.
• In case you're wondering, I get all my dyes, chemicals, and most of my supplies (squeeze bottles, etc.) from Dharma Trading Company (Dharma is one of the main suppliers for professional textile crafts. They are in San Rafael, CA, so if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, even standard shipping only takes a couple of days if you order from their website).

White Stuff

• I get most of my white stuff from Dharma. Those doggie shirts are soooo cute!
• Your local Goodwill store is a great place to get white things you can't find at Dharma. Who cares if there is a little stain on it?
• Watch stores like Target and Mervyn's for end-of-season sales on basics like white kids' shirts (turtlenecks, the latest beaded-neckline styles, and so on). Even if it's not on sale, there are often cheap white clothes available that will look great tie-dyed!
• IKEA is a great source for white stuff for the home, especially couches with slipcovers! It's a good place to get white sheets, too.

Books

Some of my favorite books on tie-dye:

• "Tie Dye To Die For & Batik You Can't Resist!" available from Dharma
• "Tie Dye, Back By Popular Demand" by Virginia Gleser available from Dharma or (sometimes) Harmony (she is the Harmony matriarch)

Videos/DVDs

Both of these DVDs are really useful and well worth getting.

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

Links

See the blog sidebar for my constantly-growing collection of useful links.

Tie-Dyeing the Furniture, Part 2

In a comment on my Tie-Dyeing the Furniture post, Anonymous said...

Oh wow I just love the furniture! I was pondering the possibility of tie-dying my two couches (that don't match...) and it gave me great hope to see yours! Now if I can just have the patience to try it myself.

Thanks!

After I did my couches, I went looking for others on the internet. I was surprised to find only a couple, and they were quite different from what I had done. I liked these ones by Wahmpee, and this one from Dye-abolical Designs. These are very different styles, so you can get a better idea of what you might like.

Really, patience isn't the main requirement, so much as the promise to yourself to really go for it and to like whatever you end up with! It's a bit of an investment, since those slipcovers range in price from $60 and up. That's not counting dyes, which can add up, especially for the really dark colors like navy that require extra dye powder per amount of water. But as long as you like what you end up with, or are willing to cheerfully throw away your investment if you really don't like it, it's well worth the effort. For my house, it makes a huge and positive change!

One tip: do some tie-dye on cheap cotton t-shirts first, with the pattern, dyes and colors you plan to use for the slipcovers. You can drape them over your furniture like swatches. You may find that you want to change the colors or pattern before doing the real thing. And hey, you can wear the shirts, or you can give them away if you hate them!

It also helps a lot to have a friend or two join you. It makes the folding and dyeing go much faster (and it's more fun, of course!), and they can help muscle the stuff around as well--it's really heavy when wet, and the slipcovers are quite large and awkward to fold.

Patience actually is helpful for a couple things: 1) letting it sit wet in the dye overnight, and 2) for ironing the slipcovers when they are washed out and finished! It's a lot to iron, but they just don't look very good until they are ironed. It's cotton, after all, and ironing makes a big difference.

If you are serious about getting the look, but don't want to do it yourself, Wahmpee does custom work, or I can. But where's the fun in having someone else do it if you can do it yourself?

Hm, I wonder how my couches would look in brown swirls to match my dog's brown t-shirt? Another project!

In Stitches

I just went to the Market at Stitches West with some friends last weekend. Though I haven't done any real knitting in many years (I used to be a serious knitting addict before I started having hand problems), I enjoyed it quite a bit. Picture about a hundred yarn and related stores all crammed into a convention hall, with all their yarns draped beautifully amid the knitted-up sample sweaters and scarves and socks. Yup, just like tie-dye, it's all about COLORS, and lots of them.

I particularly liked the offerings from Strickwear.com. Candace Eisner Strick, the designer, has a really wonderful sense of color and design (that rainbow stole in my photo looks much better in person and on her website).

One thing I noticed that is different from when I had gone before (several years ago) is that hand-dyed, variegated yarns are really dominant now. It makes sense if you think about recent trends in knitting.

The average knitters are younger than before, but have lots of other things to do. So simpler patterns to knit (such as plain stockinette knitting) and easy, small projects to complete, such as socks and scarves, are more important.

Variegated yarns provide lots of colors in a project (here are some more examples) without the knitter's having to deal with multiple balls of yarn (or two, at most) and switching colors in and out. You also don't have to choose your own color combinations--it's already professionally chosen for you, right in that one skein of yarn.

And finally, in a setting like Stitches, those gorgeous hanks of brightly-colored fibers are really eye-catching and display very well, drawing the shopper from across the hall. So do the sweaters, either on the displays or on the shoppers. I really enjoyed the display booth from Mountain Colors Hand-Painted Yarns. They had their entire line out for fondling!


Many of those hanks looked like they had been tie-dyed, and the Mountain Colors booth even showed photos of their people dyeing their yarns with squeeze bottles--it looked a lot like my tie-dyeing! I've been thinking (a little) about getting some white wool and dyeing some myself, and many others have as well. Dharma even carries yarn for dyeing.

Ooh, I'm drooling now... maybe I'll have to do some knitting again...

Dreaming in Color

Tie-Dyeing the Sheets

I recently started playing with dyeing sheets, because a lot of what I really like about tie-dye is how you can get such interesting patterns from doing various folds. Here are a few I did recently.

I now use the one above as a tablecloth.

The picture above is a twin size sheet set: fitted, flat, and pillowcase. These are 120 thread-count cotton sheets from IKEA. They are "natural" (unbleached) in color, but they dye up pretty nicely and are inexpensive enough for lots of experimentation!

Here's my latest experiment: another twin flat 120 thread-count cotton sheet from IKEA. This one is destined to be an elegant tablecloth.

Irrestistible Stitch Resist

Stitch resist, one type of shibori dyeing, is fun because you can better control where the white lines are. However, it's more work than the usual tying and dying.

Generally I stitch with dental floss, pull it tight, wrap the extra floss around the gathers, and then put a couple of rubber bands over that for a good white line.

Hearts

It's certainly possible to do hearts and other symmetric shapes without stitching, but I find that I get a much cleaner, crisper, and more uniform heart with stitching. And it's just one quick line of stitching, so I find that it's worth the small amount of extra work.

Letters

Letters can be a lot more complicated than hearts, so stitching works well for them. Here are pillows I made with letters on them.

After I stitched the outline of the K and pulled the stitching tight, I just banded up the rest of the pillow case like a bullseye pattern. Below you see the back of the K pillow (the distorted bullseye) and a side view of the pillowcase that shows how I applied bands of colors.

This M worked particularly well.

When I was feeling really ambitious, I did entire words on 12" throw pillows! These three took quite a while. The worst part was removing the stitching and rubber bands when I wanted to wash them out.

Other Shapes

You can get really creative with stitch resist. In this rainbow heart and bears tapestry, the bear faces are stitched, as is the inner heart and the inner line of the outer heart. I didn't want to take chances that my folding or tying might slip--stitching makes it much more secure.

One Color

A friend brought back this blue floral stitch resist tapestry back from China. It's about 4 feet by 4 feet and all stitch resist, probably vat dyed.

Here is a view of the right side of a corner with the wrong side of a different corner. The pattern differs based on which side the stitching is on!

I dyed this shirt after seeing the tapestry. It's hard to get the very fine detail of the tapestry onto t-shirt fabric, but it's still one of my favorite shirts.

The vine pattern goes around the back of the neck. For the stem, I folded along the line and did a running stitch through both layers of fabric, which gives it that double-line appearance. The more faded leaves are where I didn't manage to pull and tie my stitching tight enough.