I volunteered to work on crafts at my local primary school. We are making a tie dyed T-shirt for a teddy bear with the 8/9 yr olds. We started with a piece of cloth which was tie dyed, and are in the process of sewing it together on a machine 1 child at a time (with 52 children this is taking some time!). The children are really enjoying this as am I! I have spent time making this into a project with all the documentation needed for the school so they can repeat it in future years.
The picture on the left shows my sample T-shirt, the one below some of the childrens work.
As I was working in the school I mixed the procion dyes into solution with water (the tie dyed cloth had been soaked in a soda ash solution). Having not done this before I mixed 10g dye into 1 litre water which is what we used on the cloth. We used yellow, magenta and turquoise as these colours seem to mix best (with the boys size T-shirts I had previosly dyed. The children put the dye straight onto the pre-treated cloth in this dilution.
I had quite a bit left over after 2 days dyeing at the school and as the next week was half term we had a tie dye day dyeing T shirts. By this time the solutions were around 10 days old.
The photo above shows the results. The coverage was good and the colours just as vibrant (not the best pictures!)
The picture above shows another batch done with the same dye solution at 21 days. The colours are paler by comarison (the bright sunshine doesn't help comparison).
I dyed another batch of T-shirts with the solutions being 28 days old and the colours were slightly paler than the 21 day batch. The yellow fared worse than the magenta and turquoise coming out very pale. (haven't managed to take photo's yet)
The T-shirts are destined to be used as prizes at the school as so many of the children loved the yellow/purple starburst T-shirt I dyed (picture top right of 10 day batch) and the prizes are a little diffrent to the usual things they get to use!
Hope fully I'll get back to the school to get the sewing finished next week, while the children are still really excited about it!
These are the skeins in balls.
These are the skeins as dyed. It always amazes me just how diffrent the balls look compared to the skeins but I was happy with the way they all came out. They are crochet cotton in size 10 and size 20. I find because of the twist they need a long soak to get really wetted out, these soaked for 3 days in the end.
