Easy Tie Dye with Young Children

Good Day, I am so glad you have decided to check out this project to Tie Dye with kids. I have found it to be are really rewarding activity that can be done with children as young as two years old. It is a project that requires adult interaction, at least to start with.

Easy Tie Dye with Young Children

Supplies:

• rubbing alcohol
• wide mouth jar of some kind
• rubber band
• eye dropper or small squeeze bottle
• cotton shirt, or other project made from cotton that you would like to tie dye.
• colored sharpie markers

 

Directions:

To start, you have the child place the jar under the fabric where they would like to put their first design. Stretch the fabric flat then rubber band it into place.

Allow the child to choose what color they want to use, and let them draw any design they like. Note to adult: let them be, it will work out wonderful, even if all they do is lines and dots, you will be amazed. I encourage them to use at least 3 different colors, but if they don’t want to let them be.

After they are happy with the design, have them use the dropper or squeeze bottle with rubbing alcohol to put drops in the center of the design. ( It works best if they drop to the center, then the fabric draws the color to the outside of the circle. It may take a couple of designs to really see what I am talking about.) If they need to add more drops to completely cover the design, adding to the inside of the already wet circle will make the fabric continue to draw to the outside. If they do it in any other way, it still turns out really amazing to them.

They might have a tendency to color it in solid, if they are old enough to have practice coloring or drawing, my 7 year olds were doing this. Once I got them to just draw the outside of the picture and do the drops they realized that the “magic potion” does all the work for them.

Yes it is true, I told them that the alcohol was a “magic potion”.

I allowed my children to do as many designs they wanted at one time until they had explored this project completely. Some of the children wanted to do more to their shirts on the next day. What I did not do the first time was press the ink into the shirt with a hot Iron. When the shirts were washed the color faded. This time I am going to see If a hot iron will help set the ink better. If any of you try this and come up with a better solution for setting the ink, please let us know so we can try it.

I hope that all of you with small children and an itch to be creative give this project a try, even if its just on one of Dads old white tee shirts. Make him a fathers day gift of it. 🙂 It is sure to please.

This little boy looked at his project after playing outside then he said, “Wow, look what I did, it turned out so nice!”

Hope you give this a try.  Granny

No compensation was received.