Since today was a beautiful sunny day and the girls wanted to play outside, I thought it would be fun to make tie dye t-shirts.  We really have been wanting to tie dye the sheet that I got for the couch bed, which is actually our old bed that I put on the floor and we use as a couch.  I have never tie dyed before (ok once when I was Munchy’s age) so I was winging the whole idea, as usual.  Sunny (Sugar’s Mom) that helped with co-op has made a lot of tye dye shirts and she helped a lot.

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We started off with everyone putting on rubber gloves so that our hands would not get  colored.  Then we laid out our sheet, shorts, hats and shirts on the ground, or driveway.  All the girls pitch in and each one grabbed some rubber bands, pulled a section of the sheet and tied it up.  Again we were winging it and really had no plan on a design, just wanted it to look cool.  I mixed the colors, which was 1/2 cup Rit dye and one and half cups of very hot water and poured into our ketchup, mustard and mayo squirt bottles that I got at the dollar store. I gave the squirt bottles to the girls and they went to town squirting color on the big sheet. We finished up by coloring our hats, shirts, and a pair of shorts. I rinsed out the sheet, shorts, shirt and hat with cold water, let them dry for about an hour and then threw them in the laundry machine and washed and dried them. They tuned out really cool for our fist attempt.

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Here are the things we will try different next time:

• Use a table, instead of the driveway, a cookie cooling rack and aluminum roast pan to collect excess color
• wet the shirt before we start – color will absorb better into the fabric
• Let the color dry over night or at least eight hours
• Do not rinse out – love the effect but everything had a purple tent
• throw in washer after drying overnight (mom 2 told me this would not hurt my washer – I believe her now)
• try all sort of ways to fold shirts to see if we can get different designs
• Extra gloves we can fill up with water to freeze, I am sure I can come up with some kind of experiment

While we were waiting for the tie dye to dry, so I could throw it into the washer, we worked on our new plan for co-op.  I want to get away from regular school as much as possible so we thought we would let the girls decide what they wanted to learn about.  They came up with Food around the World.  The plan is to visit a different country every week and make  a  snack from that country, hopefully authentic cuisine. Each girl was given 3 items that they had to learn about and present at next co-op.  I am hoping we can do a kind of travel show about each country.  We will watch some youtube videos, and do a craft or art made in that country.  This is just a start so we will see where it takes us. Let us know if you have any fun ideas that we can try…