Hi Library friends, Miss Becky here and today I want to show you how to make a
cool tie-dye design using Sharpies. This project is perfect for teens in grades 6
through 12. If you're younger than that make sure to check with your parents
before you get started.
Tie-dying can be really fun but also
requires a lot of supplies. When you tie-dye with sharpies you probably
already have most of the supplies at home. Here's what you'll need: white
fabric. This can be a piece of fabric, an old t-shirt or a tote bag or even plain
sneakers or a baseball hat. Sharpies. You can use whatever colors you want but I
would encourage you to try and use at least 3 different colors in your designs.
Rubbing alcohol. You just need the standard rubbing alcohol that is used as
a disinfectant. You probably have some in your medicine cabinet at home.
A paintbrush, eyedropper or squirt bottle to help you cover your design with
rubbing alcohol. A piece of cardboard to prevent the sharpies from bleeding onto
the back of your t-shirt or onto your workspace. Lastly, you'll need something
to hold your fabric taut while you draw your design. You can use something like
an embroidery hoop if you're working in a circle or if you're working in a
larger area you can use binder clips to clip your shirt to the cardboard.
So let's get started. First, you'll need to get whatever mechanism you're going to
use to hold your fabric taut. Here I have an embroidery hoop
that we can use to hold our fabric taut. If you don't have an embroidery hoop you could
use something like a plastic cup and a rubber band instead.
Okay I'm also going to use my cardboard and binder clips on the main part of the t-shirt.
Once you get your t-shirt over the cardboard, you can center it then just
pull it back and clip it into place like this. And this allows your t-shirt to
stay firmly in place while you're drawing on it with sharpies,
which lets you get a smoother design.
Next, choose colors for your design.
I would suggest at least three different colors. Then you'll draw your design on the fabric.
When drawing your design don't worry about drawing with a lot of detail
because your colors will bleed together. Instead, focus on where you want each
color to be. How much white space you want and how much color you want.
The more white space you'll have the lighter your design will be and if you want a
really vibrant design you'll want a lot less white space. If you want to draw
something that's more like a traditional tie-dye design, you'll want to work in a
circle with rings and a pattern going out. So to start you can put a circle in
the middle and then a band halfway out and another band around the outer edge.
Then you can work in a star-like pattern going out from the sides and switch colors.
Traditional tie-dye is in a circle and it's banded throughout.
So once we get this diluted with the rubbing alcohol it'll really kind of
give the same general effect.
But you don't have to do something that's a traditional design. You can
really do anything that you want. Just keep in mind that the colors are gonna
bleed and run once you add the rubbing alcohol. I've had a lot of fun with a
thick zigzag design
that starts out something like this, switching colors as the zigzag goes down.
Once you're happy with your design we'll move on to the
next step which is adding rubbing alcohol.
Okay, so we'll use rubbing alcohol to dilute our design. Basically this just
breaks up the Sharpie and that has it spread wherever rubbing alcohol is on your fabric.
You can use a paintbrush, an eyedropper or a spray bottle.
It doesn't really matter what you use the most important thing is just to get your
fabric really really saturated. If you're gonna use a paintbrush be careful
because the Sharpie could tint you're rubbing alcohol a color. So to prevent
that you can kind of just use the paintbrush to drip the rubbing alcohol
on to the fabric. It takes a little bit more time so if you're not concerned
about tinting you're rubbing alcohol you can just paint the rubbing alcohol
directly on.
And it takes a little while but the longer that the rubbing alcohol is on
there the more the Sharpie will bleed and spread.
Okay, that's a little sample of that.
And then on this portion, I like to do each color separately so I
can kind of control the way that it bleeds.
And just keep going and you can see
that the lines that you drew become less defined
and as you put more rubbing alcohol on and let it sit for a longer
amount of time
it spreads even further.
Once you're done leave the design inside of your embroidery hoop until the
rubbing alcohol dries. Rubbing alcohol evaporates quicker than water so it
should only take 15 minutes. Then you can repeat the process on another portion of
your fabric or go back in with Sharpies to add solid details.
If you created a shirt, I would suggest washing it before wearing it
and be cautious because the Sharpie could bleed on other items in the wash.
After that, you're all done and feel free to share what it is that
you've made with the Library because we'd love to see what it is that you've done.
Bye!