Tie Dye a T-shirt – Keep the Kids Happy on a Rainy Day
Posted By admin On September 25, 2009 @ 3:38 pm In Arts & Crafts,Children | Comments Disabled
It’s a rainy day and the kids are at home – a parent’s nightmare. What do you do with them? How do you keep them from each other’s throats? In short, how do you preserve what little sanity still remains to you?
“Keep them occupied” is well-meant, but relatively pointless advice. Keep them occupied with what? You need specifics! You need a defined activity that will consume a few of those brain-frying hours before you can pack them off to bed.
There are many to choose from – papier mache, face painting, making your own Play Doh… But here’s one that will grab your kids’ imaginations, occupy them long enough to prevent them setting the sofa on fire and give them an end result they’ll get pleasure out of for months afterwards. It has the added bonus that you, too, may enjoy the process.
Tie dyeing a t-shirt is a simple process that produces a colourfully unique result every time. Simple or not, though, the act of creating an item of clothing, something usually so much the province of the adult world, helps to give your children a sense of their own potential and, in its own small way, helps build confidence in their own abilities.
As well, the artistic element inherent in tie dyeing demands very little technical skill and allows your child to experience the thrill of creation without the off-putting need for little fingers to master brushstrokes or delicate manipulations. This kind of artistic endeavour, experienced as a sense of fun, can often be the entry point into more complex and demanding art forms later in the child’s development.
Convinced? Want to make some wearable art with your kids? Here’s how:
It’s simple. When you tie something tight enough around part of a garment then drop that garment in a pot of dye, the dye can’t get to the areas you’ve bound. When the garment is removed and the ties undone you get…patterns.
One of the beauties of tie dyeing is that there are no rules about how you can pattern your shirt. You can make it as simple or as complex, as structured or as freeform as you like.
As a simple example, let’s take that classic tie dye design, “the bulls eye”. You think of tie dye, you think of a set of wiggly concentric circles on the front of a shirt, right? To make it, follow the steps below.
By following the steps above you’ll end up with a t-shirt that has concentric white rings on it. In tie dyeing, however, you don’t need to restrict yourself (or your children) to one colour. By dyeing a shirt more than once and carefully sequencing your colours you can create multi-coloured masterpieces. For instance:
You now have a green shirt (yellow and blue make green) that has blue and yellow rings!
When using multiple colours think carefully about the effect each successive colour will have on the one before it. You don’t want to end up with a murky brown mess.
As well as playing with colours, you can get your children to experiment with different tying techniques, for example:
A session of tie dyeing with the kids will burn up a good couple of hours and help you get through that rainy day. But it will also provide a rewarding experience for all who participate, stimulating creativity, enhancing self-worth and producing an item of clothing which is not only attractive but sentimentally valuable as a memory of time spent together.
Learn more about tie dyeing a t-shirt in this video.
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