It’s tie-dye for!

For a do-it-yourself fashion statement, you can’t beat tie-dye. Besides the rainbow colors, part of its appeal is the element of surprise–you never know exactly what you’ve created until you’re finished. And it’s easy to get started with the popular spiral design explained in this 2torial. So grab a plain cotton T-shirt, dress, or even some underwear–it’s time to express the hippie within.

While handling dyes is a great way to get personal with color, it can also be extremely messy. If you mix very fine powder dyes with water, protect your lungs with a surgical mask or filter over your mouth and nose. To protect your eyes from dye dust, use protective goggles.

Choose fabric and dyes

Choose a cotton garment to dye. You can also tie-dye silks and other materials, but silk is more expensive, and the man-made fibers in some fabrics resist dyes. For the purposes of this 2torial, we’ll assume you’ve chosen a white, 100-percent cotton T-shirt, though you can easily adjust the directions for any type of garment. Plain cotton T-shirts are available in most department stores.

When choosing dyes, remember you’ll get the most vivid results with cold water fiber-reactive dyes. Find them at craft stores and online. Just type “dyes” or even “tie-dye” into a search engine, and you’ll find several supply companies.

Prepare fabric and dyes

Before you get to the creative part, you must prepare:

Protect yourself and your work space. Lay cardboard, plastic, or newspaper on the floor or table where you’ll be working to protect all surfaces from dyes that may splash.

Also remember to wear old clothes when you tie-dye, in case you accidentally spill some dye on yourself.

Fabric. Pre-treat your garment to get the best and quickest bond with the dye. Sodium carbonate, in the form of soda ash (available at craft stores and online), does the trick. Put on rubber gloves and mix 1 cup (240 milliliters) of it into 1 gallon (3.8 liters) of warm water. Submerge your T-shirt in this mixture, and let it soak for 15 minutes. The gloves protect your hands from the mixture’s somewhat harsh alkalinity.

After soaking, remove the T-shirt from the solution and wring it out–or you can put it in the washing machine and run the spin cycle, if you prefer. Either way, the T-shirt should still be damp–but not dripping wet–when you start dying it (in Step 3).

Dyes. Use old margarine tubs or small glass bowls to mix the dyes while the T-shirt soaks in the soda ash solution. Follow directions on the package and be careful not to inhale the fine dust or get it on your skin. If it does get on your skin, rinse with cool water. You don’t need to wear gloves for this procedure.

Create a spiral design

Tie-dye designs are made by preventing dye from permeating certain parts of the garment during the coloring process. Material can be protected from dye by tightly scrunching, twisting, and/or sewing up certain parts. Here’s how to twist a spiral into a T-shirt and then dye around that basic design:

• Lay the damp, pre-treated T-shirt flat on your work surface, face up, and smooth out all the wrinkles.
• Take a dowel and place the tip of it on the shirt where you want the center of the spiral to be.
• While keeping firm pressure on the dowel’s tip, turn it counterclockwise to gather up the material around the dowel.
• The material will begin to bunch up around the dowel in pleats. Keep the pleats from climbing up the dowel by flattening them with your hand. As you flatten the pleats, keep them from becoming too fat by creating new pleats within the pleats, thus creating a kind of whirlpool effect in the fabric.

• Continue to twist the dowel and flatten the material while refining the pleats, until you have what looks like a cinnamon roll.
• Take three rubber bands and secure the cinnamon roll-like T-shirt with them. Place the rubber bands so that they evenly divide the rolled-up shirt, like a freshly cut pie.

• The six “slices” that the three rubber bands create make natural guidelines for dying the T-shirt. If you want to create more guidelines for more slices and colors, add more rubber bands.

Add color

Now comes the fun part:

• Place your bundled T-shirt and your dyes on your work surface.
• Decide on a general pattern of color to apply to your shirt. Although you’ll never know the final design until you rinse the shirt out, you can put complementary colors next to one another at this stage, if you like.
• Take an applicator such as a sponge brush, medium-size paint syringe, or squirt bottle (all available at craft stores) and apply the first color to one of the slices. Make sure you apply enough color to saturate the fabric on this side of the T-shirt roll.
• Be careful not to blend colors at the rubber-band borders of the slices. You can either leave a little white space there, or apply the dyes right next to one another without blending them. Also be careful not to let colors run together in the center of the bundled T-shirt; in fact, keep this point free of dye, by about 1/4 inch (.6 centimeter). If the colors do run together there, they’ll probably create a brown spot.
• After coloring the front of the bundle, turn it over and color the back. You can make it the same color per slice for a more consistent look, or mix it up. If you decide to mix it up, be careful to leave 1/4 inch (.6 centimeter) white space on the sides of the bundle, so the different colors don’t run into one another and become muddy in that spot.

Let it set, rinse, wash, and wear

While you’ve essentially completed your job, the dye still needs to do its magic. Put the bundled T-shirt on some newspapers for a minute or two so that any extra dye can drain off. If you set the bundle down for only a short while, newspaper ink shouldn’t come off on the shirt. To be extra careful, you can put a layer of paper towels on top of the newspaper. Then:

Set. Place the bundled T-shirt in a plastic bag and set it out of the way for 24 hours. It can set for as little as 8 hours, but the longer time period allows the colors to deepen fully.

Rinse. With the T-shirt still bundled up, rinse away each segment of color under a faucet, running cold water directly over the slice, from the center outward, while you hold the bundled T-shirt at a near-vertical angle under the faucet. The rinsing should dilute the excess dye that comes streaming off the bundle, so the rinsed color shouldn’t affect the other colors if it should run into them. Rinse the bundle front and back, until the dye streaming off the bundle looks pale and diluted, then remove the rubber bands by cutting them. After briefly admiring your handiwork and the final design, rinse the entire shirt until the water runs nearly clear.

Wash. Put the shirt alone (or with other, similarly tie-dyed projects) in the washing machine with nonchlorine, nonbleach detergent and wash in cold water.

Dry. You can hang the tie-dyed T-shirt on a clothesline or put it in the dryer and dry as you would any cotton T-shirt.

There you have it: your very own, one-of-a-kind, tie-dyed T-shirt. It’s suitable for picnics, reunions, Frisbee games, concerts, and more. Wear your creation with peace, love, and pride!