The Hand-Painted Tie Dye

There are so many creative ways to adorn your tie dye with designs. Hand-painting is one way to spice up your craft! The image on this shirt was painted using a thickened version of fiber-reactive dye. While there are several ways to thicken your dye, I prefer the Sodium Alginate method. Sodium Alginate is a seaweed-based food thickener. You can add as much or as little as you like to your dyes, with more concentrated thickener being ideal for more precise lines. Another trick I used on this shirt was an Elmer's glue resist to paint in the stars on the background. Just paint the glue on, allow it to dry and then paint over the top of it! When you wash out the dye, the glue washes out also, leaving the perfectly white stars behind! Neat! The rest of the shirt was tie dyed in the traditional scrunch method. I also used thickened dye to do the tie dye portion of the shirt in order to prevent bleed into the center painting. If you would like to see the process for this shirt, visit our YouTube channel. The link can be found at the bottom of the page! Happy crafting everyone!