All Tied Up – fabric that is!

I’ve been playing with string and rubber bands lately, tying up some fabric. It’s been a lot of fun and I thought I’d show you my results.

tie dyed pieces

I started with some pieces of white fabric and tied them up. You can find lots of different tie patterns online. Just google tie dye patterns.

fabric tied up

Then I soaked them in soda ash water for about an hour – longer than normal because of all of the folds. I wanted to make sure the soda ash penetrated the whole fabric.

Then I mixed up my fiber reactive dyes. I’m using a palette that reminds me of the Southwest which includes orange, light green, light blue, and light and dark purple.

dyes mixed up

I used pipettes to drop the dye on the fabric.

dropping dye on fabric

Adding dye to tied fabric

Then I put them out in the sun to dry.

tie dyed fabric in sun

Twenty-four hours later I rinsed, washed, dried, and ironed the fabric. I tried different folds and changed the order of the dye colors to see which I liked better. Here are my results.

tiedyepiece1 tiedyedpiece2 tiedyedpiece3 tiedyedpiece4 tiedyedpiece5 tiedyed6 tiedyedpiece7Another picture of the complete set.

tiedyedpieces

Do you have a favorite? How would you use this fabric?