Tie-Dye With The Kids

This Instructable will show you how to tie-dye, and how to do it with children, so that they have fun, and are proud of their work. 
I have 4 kids, ages 6, 4, 2 and 2. They loved doing this project. 
It kept them busy for a few hours over the course of two days. 

Here are a few pointers in working with the kids. 

1: relax. 
2: make one job into a lot of smaller tasks, to keep them occupied. 
3: don't look for perfection
4: try not to worry about the mess. 
5: the dye eventually washes off the skin. 
6: make sure nobody gets hurt. 
7: make sure everybody has fun. 

Step 1: Gather supplies/ get kids ready.

We used a tie-dye kit. I bought it from amazon. You can also get it at craft stores. I like this kit because it is not expensive, you can make a lot of shirts, you don't need to boil water, the colors are nice and bright.  I've tried using rit dye, and it's not as good. I also like this kit because it comes with squirt bottles, which i like better than dipping into buckets. 

You also need shirts. I got two five packs, one boy's, one men's. You can use old shirts, or get new ones. 100% cotton works best. We also dyed 2 pairs of socks and a pair of undies.  

You also will need:

• a bucket
• water
• zip lock bags
•  

and some patience. 

Our kit came with a DVD on how to tie-dye. I put this on for the kids while i gathered the supplies. They had fun watching the dvd to get ideas. 

Comments

[CatTrampoline]

This reminded me of tie-dye with my son about 10 years ago (which was revisiting my classroom tie-dye adventure in 5th grade). I think blue-green fingers were involved, but it was fun.

I especially like that you reminded people to not worry about the mess and just have fun together. Even working outside, I have several relatives who would freak out at any stains or splatters.

[shazni]

lovely children...requires patience to do this :-)...which comes with motherhood

[Penolopy Bulnick]

What a wonderful activity to do with your kids! I would have worried about it being too messy, but I see everything went really well. That's great :)

[domestic_engineer]

Thanks. Yeah, our hands got a little stained, but not too bad. The key is to do a lot outside, so stains are no biggie. This squirt bottle method is great too. When you do it by dipping into buckets of dye, so much messier!

[sunshiine]

They look like they had a great time! Thanks for sharing.
Sunshiine