For best results use with natural fabrics. Yeah, that would have been nice to have read BEFORE we decided to tie dye today. I was at the Dollar Tree over the weekend and found some plain white pillowcases. We have an upcoming road trip this weekend and I thought it would be fun for the girls to decorate their own pillowcase. Just to let you know, the pillowcases are 100% polyester  (hey it was a dollar, what did I expect?) and NOT tie dye friendly!

I was thinking the girls would do a cheap silk-screen method on their pillowcases (I will show you our method in another post, I promise!). But then I was perusing the updated craft section at my local Walmart and came across a $3 tie dye kit! The kit came with two bottles, two dyes, rubber bands and 2 pairs of gloves. We have a tie dye  kit from a few years ago but have used most of the dyes already.  Just to get two different dyes for $3 is a great deal but then when it comes with everything you need is even better!

For the last two days I kept on thinking the rain and dreariness would end so we would have time to tie dye. Unfortunately, the weather has not been cooperative plus one of my daughters and myself are sick so that meant we couldn’t go anywhere or have anyone over. I decided that we could tie dye in our garage! I brought down a plastic drop cloth (afterwards we just threw the whole thing out…we had re-used it multiple times for house painting!) and laid it on the cement. It worked perfect.

I decided to use an additional/color bottle mainly so that each girl can have their own bottle. Our old kit just had little Ziploc baggies with the individual colors in them, with no labels. So what I thought was a yellow was really a green but the girls didn’t mind (FYI, the $3 kit has the name of the color on the bottle- love that!).

I thought since we had three bottles of dye made up, we could do a couple of t-shirts as well. We just used some boys’ white undershirts we already had and they worked great (plus they are 100% cotton so they dyed really well).  The pillowcases soaked up a lot of dye. We made 3 shirts and 3 pillowcases with 3 bottles of dye. If you just dyed t-shirts, you could probably dye 5-6 shirts with the kit.

We let our items sit for 7 hours. Then it was time to cut the bands and throw everything in the wash. The pillowcases were dripping dye and were very messy. The shirts looked cool just taking the bands off. I am typing this as they wash for the first time. I really hope they turn out well and the girls will not be disappointed. Regardless, it was a lot of fun especially since it cost me under $7 (the price of one matinee movie ticket!), plus the girls have their own custom-made pillowcase and t-shirt for our trip!