How to Make Tie Dye Designs
Learn all about the basic tie dye techniques and find cool tie dye designs and how to do them.
You may have seen a variety of tie dye patterns as you explore different ideas for what to make this summer. But it's time to get back to basics!
Here you'll learn how to make tie dye designs. Once you have a basic understanding of how folding and dying creates those beloved patterns, you'll be equipped to experiment with your folding and dying to make completely unique projects to you!
As a special bonus, just in case you need a little more guidance before running wild with designing your own tie dye projects, we have a list at the bottom of this article of different tie dye tutorials to help you out.
Get excited! DIY tie dye designs are soon to be yours for the making.
Get inspired by all of the tie dye projects you can make with our popular collection of100+ Tie Dye Patterns and Techniques
Tie Dye Folding Techniques
You can fold, crumple, swirl, and bunch your fabric into a variety of shapes to create new and unique tie dye patterns. There are a few classic tie dye patterns below utilizing these techniques, but here we'll focus on folding.
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When folding your fabric to dye, it's important to be sure you do one of two things: dye your fabric using only one color by submerging the entire fabric item in dye, or be very careful when squirting colors from a bottle so they don't blend together in the wrong way and turn brown. In fact, the latter is important no matter how your project is folded!
As a general rule, the more intricately folded your fabric is, the more likely it is that colors will not permeate through the cloth. When color doesn't permeate, it can create appealing white spaces, but sometimes if you end up with too much white space this might not be the intended effect. -
You can always keep it simple and accordian fold your fabric. This is a great option for beginners. Learn more about this technique here: Folding Tie Dye Technique.
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Some techniques like itajime, which is a form of shibori tie dye, not only involve a great deal of folding but a shape resist technique as well. Accordion fold your fabric in two directions: you'll fold one way to you end up with a long strip, and then you'll accordion fold in the other direction so you end up with a square. Bind with rubber bands.
Twine and Rubber Band Tie Dye
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Rubberbands and twine are key to getting those white lines throughout that add depth and interest to your tie dye patterns! Add as many or as few as you see fit to your folded or crumpled (or swirled!) fabric.
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You can even use found objects like marbles, blocks of wood, and other items. Then you can secure those in the fabric using twine or rubberbands to get unique patterns.
Picture below: Funky Tie Dye Socks and Pink Butterfly DIY Tie-Dye Shirt. -
It's really as simple as that! Folding or crumpling your fabric, then adding rubber bands, are the two steps to preparing your fabric for dying and achieving those unique designs!
Tie Dye Techniques and Resources
Want to achieve a specific effect with tie dye? Check out our basic tutorials below.
This folding tie-dye technique with photos makes it simple to create beautiful wearables and home accents.
Create colorful bursts of color on fabric with this sunburst tie-dye technique.
Use salt to create subtle, textured designs in tie-dye with this salt resist tie-dye technique
Create circles of tie-dye color on shirts and other fabrics with the bullseye tie-dye technique.
Classic and easy way to create tie-dye designs in shirts and other fabrics.
If you've ever wanted to learn how to tie-dye, this is the perfect project to try.
The Spider Tie Dye Design is a gorgeous way to combine bright colors with a darker dye.
Follow the written instructions below to create a tie-dye heart design on fabric.
If you've always wanted to try dying fabric but didn't know where to start, this is the perfect article for you!
The general steps of how to tie dye are probably relatively blurry in your mind.
First off, there is no reason to panic. No matter what you do, tie dye will eventually wear off from your skin.
If you cannot keep your tie dye from fading, it can be hard to show off those artistic skills.
Washing your tie dye projects and tie dye shirts properly is imperative to keeping colors bright and projects perfect.