It’s officially summertime, and that means spending more time doing outdoor DIY projects. This weekend, the tie-dye experiment. (It doesn’t hurt to have a badminton net that doubles as a clothes line.) We’re planning a summer dinner party soon in honor of Lauren’s birthday, so in preparation for a really special table-setting, I tie-dyed some cotton cloth napkins (formerly white bandannas) in bright colors. Follow along and I’ll show you how easy it is to do.

I’ve been experimenting with tie-dye techniques for years. As a television producer for Martha Stewart, our Style department would create amazing tie-dye projects every summer, and it took forever: a team of crafters made multi-color textiles in every shape and form. Sometimes you have to learn how to do things the most elaborate way before you can figure out the easiest. Start with RIT dye. It’s the best there is. You can get it at Home Depot or at Michael’s Craft store in a multitude of colors. If you get fancy, you can also blend and make your own tints and shades of color by using less or more. Use 100% cotton cloth–never a blend. I used white bandannas that I found for less than two dollars each. First, I folded them like a fan, lengthwise, then attached rubber-bands tightly about two inches apart.

I enlisted the help of my son, Jack, who’s always up for a DIY project. (Of course, I let him go crazy with kid’s colors later, and he made several t-shirts for camp) We poured a pasta pot full of boiling water into each of these tall, clean Home Depot buckets, adding two packages of dye to each bucket. We chose powder pink and tan. Jack added one cup of salt to each bucket, plus half a cup of Tide detergent with softener (our secret weapon). He then stirred the ingredients with a wooden dowel. Gloves are essential, because these dyes are permanent. We threw the napkins wrapped in rubber bands into the “vats” of hot dye and waited for about twenty minutes. An eternity for Jack!

Once the napkins had reached the desired intensity of color, we put them in a stainless steel bucked full of COLD water and swished them. This is the fun part. You can see that the fabric detergent we added is softening the material after being shocked by the scalding hot water and dye.

Finally, we lay the dyed napkins in the sun for a few minutes to dry off, then clipped-off the rubber bands with a scissor. Be sure to cover your work surface. We used an old camping tarp.

It’s exciting to reveal the areas where the dye did not seep through!
This is what the pattern looks like. Isn’t it great? Each of the napkins takes the process differently, so they all end up slightly different from each other.

We followed the same exact technique with the tan. As I had hoped, the tan color ended up being more of a burnt orange. Love it.

This is the finished product of the tan dye. It’ll dry to an even lighter shade.

Thanks to the badminton net, we were able to look at our work and let it dry in the warm summer sun. I’m still formulating my plan for the table-setting, but I started to play around with some pieces I’ve collected (see below). I’ll be sure to share the Birthday table-setting with you once I’ve got it all together. It’s going to be fabulous! If you have any tie-dye stories to share, please send photos. We love seeing what you’re all up to. -S