Gnome Getting Psycadelic

For some time now, Liz and I have been holding onto our whites. We went to Ikea and bought a white duvet cover and pillow cases and we also got some dish towels/bar rags. Moving back to Harrisburg with the Fulton fam, we uncovered a stash of Tie Dye materials from Kathryn. With her permission and guidance, we went through the process of making some colorful art out of these blank slates.

Prior to starting, Liz watched numerous YouTube videos of hippies in their basements showing how to fold and band the desired patterns. We decided to try a mandala pattern on the duvet cover and go for whatever felt right for the rest of the items. Before applying bands, we bucket washed the whites in a mixture of water and Soda Ash which can be bough in bulk in the pool supplies of most department or pool stores. The ratio for the mix we used was ~1 cup soda ash to ~1 gallon of water. We really soaked them for a good half hour (or how ever long we played Halo Reach for). 

After we squeezed out the water, it was time to fold our patterns and apply bands. I went gung-ho in my own special patterns while Liz attempted more traditional styles. The duvet was so large, we called it our baby Alli-guitar.

Dye was applied following the process of ROYGBIV being sure to avoid running colors together in a mega mess; not to say some areas came out a little wonky. After dye was applied, each item was placed in its own plastic bag for the dye to set for the next 24 hours.

Fast forward to the next day and we are stoked to see our artwork. We started with the smallest rags first. The process of cleaning them is fairly straight forward.

1. Turn on cold tap
2. Place cloth under water
3. Wring out 10,000,000 times.
4. Let sit for 20 mins
5. Wring out another dozen times.

As you can imagine, this took some time to do all the towels giving us a new appreciation to those stalls that have hundreds of tapestries for sale. It was a near painful process which took about two hours of rinsing to complete. Once they were all rinsed, they took a cold spin in the washing machine followed by a dry session.

And without further ado, here's the outcome.

And the Duvet