Tie Dye Blog

Painting exploded when paint came ready in a tube. Tie dye is still waiting on its moment. Chemistry is what's in the way, and the series takes it off the table.

Hot water irrigation puts one setting in the name of an entire technique. It is just irrigation. Temperature and soda ash are dials you choose, and heat is the one that fights saturation hardest.

Why tie-dye belongs on stage and why I've been putting my work on musicians for years. The stage is the natural environment for this work.

A fixative doesn't fix anything. Here's what it actually does to the loose dye sitting in your fabric, and why washing it out properly is the permanent answer.

Dry dye powder on a tied shirt, from the studio bench. How much powder, how little water, where soda ash fits, and how to read the layers from underneath.

Nobody really talks about this. You buy a piece, you love it, and then you wash it like a gym shirt and wonder why it looks different in two years. This isn't a gym shirt. It's a piece of art. Treat it like one. Here's how to care for fiber reactive tie dye so it stays that way. The dye isn't going anywhere Fiber reactive dye forms a covalent bond with the cotton fiber. That's not marketing language. It means the dye molecule and the fiber molecule share electrons and become

The Tie-Dye Supply List I Wish I'd Had When I Started There is no shortage of fiber reactive tie-dye supplies lists on the internet. Most of them were written by someone who bought a kit once. This one wasn't. Everything on this list is something I've actually used. A lot of it replaced something else I tried first. The squeeze bottles replaced bigger bottles. The smaller tips replaced the standard ones. The beakers replaced guesswork. Every item here earned its spot through

Let's start with the honest answer: most people have no framework for pricing handmade art. They see a t-shirt and they price it against the rack at Target. That's the wrong comparison, and I want to explain why. You're Buying Something That Will Never Exist Again Every piece in this store is one of one. Not "limited edition." Not a small run. One. The fold, the dye application, the chemistry, the timing, the specific cotton fiber in that specific blank on that specific day.

How fiber reactive tie dye actually works: scour the shirt, what Procion dye does, how strong to mix soda ash and when to apply it, curing with heat in 90 minutes, and the washout. Full episode transcript.

How irrigation tie dye works: four live experiments on Ron Star folds, soda ash timing, the 2 to 1 dye and soda ash mix, hot water and chroma, reading the back of the fold, and the boil batch cure. Full episode transcript.

Jon Riley of Trip Team Tie Dye on Kenney style tie dye: what a nub is, the sleeve to sleeve mirror fold, starting the center row, alternating rows, and how to dye it. Full episode transcript.