I’ve been meaning to write up this post for the LONGEST time now! I’ve been so busy creating in the studio that I’ve neglected this little blog!
NO MORE!
I have a few posts planned out – so it’s time to get crackin’ on them!
To kick it all off, I’d like to share a little tutorial on how I made these cute little tie-dye hair ties that you can find in my etsy shop.
What you’ll need to make your own:
•white fold over elastic (I scored a HUGE 300 yard roll of 1/2″ elastic on Ebay a while back, so that’s what I used. But you can use any size you want, so long as it’s white).
•dye & dye fixative! ( I used RIT liquid dye – you can find it in many stores, though I got mine at Joanns on sale for half-off!)
•rubber bands
•gloves
•ziplock baggies
**I poured a little liquid dye into small squirt bottles that I found at Hobby Lobby – but you certainly don’t *have* to do that. I just did it for convenience**
It’s always good to start by prepping your materials. In this case, cutting your elastic. I prepared enough to make up 4 different band colors. Since each elastic strip is roughly 8 inches long per hair tie – and I usually make 10 hair ties at a time – I figured out that I needed to cut 4 elastic strips, each 90 inches long (that’s 80 inches plus a little extra to be safe).
Once you have your elastic cut, you’ll want to bind it up. I wadded each strip up (in a hap-hazard style) and then put the rubber bands on as you see in the picture below:
Next, you’ll want to figure out which colors you want to put together. I tried to keep things organized so it would go a little faster, since I was having my 5-year-old help me for fun.
**I found out with this run that similar colors didn’t work so well. I had paired a dark blue with a very light blue – it all basically came out the same. ALSO, it’s VERY difficult to keep the dark colors from bleeding into and taking over lighter colors – like green and yellow. And even though I let these sit overnight, all the colors came out CONSIDERABLE lighter than the color on the bottle indicated. Since this wasn’t the first time I’ve dyed FOE (fold over elastic) I knew going in that the colors would be lighter – but this was my first time using the liquid dye, so it was the first time I’d seen how hard it is to get this elastic to accept the dye. It wanted to bead off – making this a MUCH messier endeavor than I originally anticipated.
Next up, DON YOUR GLOVES because it’s time to apply the dye. I had my daughter help me apply one color per segment of exposed elastic. (though the pic shows my hands because she took the picture).
It’s pretty messy! And the dye kind of seeps together where the rubber band is. Try to get it all good and saturated right up to the rubber band. Once you have it all colored-up, you can take your whole mess and put it into your ziplock baggies to sit overnight.
Now it’s time to unbind and slightly rinse it all out. Use your gloves and don’t ring out the bands! I had to carefully cut the rubber bands away which is what you’re seeing in the sink here:
I put new ziplock baggies filled with water and the dye fixative into cups which these elastic strips went into once I’d freed them from their rubber bands and slightly rinsed them out.
I let them sit a little longer than the directions suggested on the bottle of fixative. I just wanted to make sure I gave it as much of an opportunity as I could to hold the dye.
Once they sat for slightly longer than the recommend time, I pulled them out and rinsed them in the sink. This time I gave them a good rinsing and rang them out too. Then I hung them to dry. When they were completely dry I gathered them up and went to my table to start cutting them into the 8″ segments I mentioned earlier – for turning them into the hair ties you see in the shop.
Once they’re cut, you just knot the ends together like so:
The very last thing that I like to do is to heat-seal the cut ends. Easiest way to do that is to use a lighter. It takes only a second though! You don’t want to cook your cut ends!
Finished up, they came out like this:
In this last one (the blue one), you can see that there’s a slight difference in the color. Overall, it came out looking like a solid light blue. In the future I’ll do drastically different colors.
I hope you enjoy the tutorial! Feel free to ask any questions you like below! And I’d like to see what you make, so please drop an image or link to your creations below too! Thanks for reading!
Happy Creating!!!
<3
Kristen
