It’s been a weird year and definitely less eventful than planned. I imagined seeing people a whole lot more than I did, for sure. Now that the weather is about to get chilly and Summer 2020 is coming to an end, I thought: why not do something fun and creative and with everyone outside while we still can!? This mid-September weather is perfect and and I’m all about taking full advantage of it!

I gathered a few of my close friends and we had a such a great time. We had hand towels, tea towels, socks, and bandanas (most of us have dogs to sport these) for everyone to dye, plus most people brought their own stuff as well! From shirts, sweatshirts, pants, onesies, and bedsheets, everyone got a chance to get creative and so many fun color combos and patterns were created.

I decided to use Rit Dye for this party instead of using a tie dyeing kit. I’m sure a tie dyeing kit would work great, but I wanted less neon and more neutral options.

I got a pack of squeeze bottles to mix the inks with water in. Putting blank labels on ahead of time definitely helped so that we could write the colors on the side as we made them.

We used cooling racks as dyeing racks to elevate the fabric from the grass a little. Keeping a hose handy was necessary for this process! We could easily wet our items before dyeing, as well as rinsing off the dyeing racks in between dyeing.

Next dye party I’ll have to make a proper dye setting station ahead of time. The dye needed to set in the fabric for at least 30 minutes.

After the dye set on the fabric for a bit, we mixed up the Rit Dye Fixative with some water in an old sriracha bottle and covered our fabric with that.

And here are some of finished results!