Tie Dye Absurdity

The "Swagman" camper conversion that was done on my bus in 1978 includes a small awning which extends from the side and is held up by a couple of telescopic poles (see picture to the right). It's quite nifty but it's not that big and somehow it didn't really feel sufficiently impressive for the mobile home of the Psy Chi Foundation. I felt that really what was needed was something a bit more... well "Psy". Well that shouldn't be too hard, right? I mean, the web is full of videos and sites explaining how to do tie dye, so making a nice psychedelic awning looked like it would be pretty straightforward.

Well, not so much, as it turns out. Tie dye has some important similarities to cooking. Making a nice meal for 4 people is not that hard if you follow the recipes carefully and take your time.  Try making the same meal for 24 and you run it all sorts of painful logistical problems that render pretty much all of the techniques used for the 4-person version irrelevant. All those tutorials and videos on tie dye? They're for t-shirts. One or two discuss working with thin cotton bed sheets. None of them is for 30 square metres of heavy calico. Working with this weight of material suddenly makes a gentle hobby activity into a serious undertaking! For anyone foolish enough to try this sort of exercise themselves, here are my tips:

1. Read Paula Burch's site of dying. There's a massive wealth of useful stuff on there, it will give you lots of background that will help you with the tasks ahead. It's by far the single most useful resource for this sort of stuff that I found. Keep digging through the FAQ as well - there's a lot of useful material buried away under funny headings, e.g. here where there's a useful recipe for tie dye in the middle of a page on Sodium Alginate.
2. Get together the relevant materials and equipment. I used the following:
• A large tub. I used a builder's rubble tub from a local builder's merchant
• Some rubber gloves
• Some 24oz squeezy condiment bottles.
• A big mixing bowl and a whisk
• Procion dyes. I used one 21gm packet per squeezy bottle for pale colours, two for dark colours. With 6 bottles this was enough (just!) to cover 30 square metres of moderately heavy cotton fabric
• 500gm of Soda ash
• Some urea
• A small tub of Manutex RS (sodium alginate)
• A washing machine (unless you are really brave)
• A hose pipe (also not strictly necessary, but again, makes things much easier)
• Some sort of big/tall hanging line/rack/whatever outside on which you can hang your fabric and where you can squirt lots of water around with impunity
• A really big expanse of flat space, which you may need to cover with plastic sheeting if it's e.g. a lawn or very dirty. I needed an 8x1.5m space to work with my largest piece of material.
• Some sort of metal rack that will fit over your tub in some fashion. I removed the legs from a washing drying rack and used that. It needs to be big enough that your folded tie dye material will fit on it, so probably 50cm x 50cm is going to the smallest you can get away with, you may need something bigger than that.
• Lots of string
• Some clothes pegs
3. Mix your thickened chemical water: for every bottle of dye that you want, add 3 tablespoons of urea and 1.5 teaspoons of the Manutex RS to 24 fl oz of water. The urea you can just dissolve normally; the Manutex you want to sprinkle slowly over the water, whisking all the time so that it blends in. If you have hard water you should also be adding 2/3rds of a teaspoon of  sodium hexametaphosphate/calgon
4. Mix your dyes. Add 1 (or 2 for dark colours) 2/3oz measure of Procion dye to 24 oz of water (that way round) and mix together thoroughly with the whisk. Pour into one of your squeezy bottles. You should wear a mask when handling dyes, apparently they can irritate your lungs. Once you've done this you have you basic dye solutions that will keep for a week or so.
5. Cut your material. Your awning will be made in strips whose width is determined by the width of the material you've chosen. I used a drill calico that was 1.5m wide, and made it in 3 strips to give me a 4.5m wide awning. The length of the awning is then determined by how long you make the strips. I would suggest confining yourself to a maximum of 6 metres unless you are very brave - beyond this point it gets very tricky and the results tend not to be as good.
6. Wash your material - standard 40 degree machine wash. Don't dry the pieces though. While they are washing, prepare your folding area, covering with plastic sheeting if necessary.
7. Fold each piece of the damp material.  I went with classic spirals because the material was heavy and folds that put material many layers thick (e.g. mandala/circle-style folds) would have meant it was very hard to get the dye to penetrate properly; they're also a bit more structured than just random bunching/accordion-style folds. The principle is the same as for doing a spiral with a t-shirt; I'm not going to explain the basics here as there are many good tutorials on YouTube etc. What's different is that your material is unlikely to be even remotely square, so you'll want to do multiple spirals. Start at one end, and identify the point which would be the centre of square whose dimensions were determined by the width of the fabric (as if you were chopping a square of fabric off the end of your strip). This is the centre of your first spiral. Start spinning from here. Make sure you keep the height of your pleats to no more than a couple of inches or you will have problems later; ensuring this will entail taking your time and being methodical - it took me a good 30 minutes to do each spiral.
   
   As you get to the end of your first spiral you will eventually have to make a decision to stop pulling in more material. At this point you want to identify the centre of your next square, and start spinning that in the opposite direction to the first one. The point where the two spirals meet will inevitably be a bit messy; pleat it up as best you can and don't worry about it too much. If you're doing a big piece of fabric you may need to do a third spiral as well, back in the same direction as the first one.
   
   You should now have three spirals bunched up together. You want to tighten them all up against each other as best you can, forming them into something like a big circle. Start winding string around the outside, pulling it as tight as possible to try and hold the thing together. Once you've got 10 or so windings around the outside, tie if off and then start looping string over the top and underneath, effectively dividing the disc into segments (as you would when tying a normal spiral tie dye). You will need at least 10 ties in this direction for the thing to have any chance of holding its shape when wet. Again, patience is the order of the day here, keep putting more ties around it (and pulling them really tight) until you have some confidence that you can lift the disc up, turn it over, work with it etc.
8. Mix up the soda ash solution in your big tub. You need 16 fl oz of soda ash (measure it in a measuring jug) to 2 gallons of water (9 litres). Soak each disc in this for an hour and then take out. You should be wearing your rubber gloves from now on, soda ash is caustic. Try and squeeze out as much of the excess liquid as possible and then leave to drain for an hour or so. When you've soaked them all you can get rid of your soda ash solution. If you don't feel up to dying all your discs in one go then you can always do them one by one, making up more soda ash solution each time. 500 grams will do about 3 lots of 9 litres.
9. You should now have a number of discs ready to dye. Place each one in turn on the wire rack over the tub. This stage is as normal for spiral tie dye, follow the standard instructions for applying the colour, but bear in mind that this is thick heavy material with thickened dye, so be sure to work the dye into the folds well. You'll want to poke around with your gloved fingers to open up the folds a bit and make sure it gets right in. 
10. Batch as normal in a plastic bin liner overnight. Let it drip through the rack for a short while before you put it in to minimize smudging. You may well need help to manoeuvre the heavy wet disc into the bag!
11. The next day  you need to rinse. This is really hard work! What I did was this:
1. Put the disc on the wire rack over the tub and rinse through with the hose pipe without undoing it. Turn it over and do the same on the other side
2. Cut off the string and open it out very slightly, continue rinsing on the rack. When the tub gets full, empty it out and put the material into it
3. Now do 3 cycles of filling the tub partly up with water, working it into the material for a few minutes to rinse out the dye and emptying the coloured water out. You want to work reasonably fast to avoid the material being soaked in the coloured water and the colours running.
4. Put the material into the washing machine and spin it
5. Do another 3 cycles of filling/rinsing in tub
6. Spin again
7. Hang the material up somewhere outside and go at it with the hosepipe for a good 15-20 minutes to rinse as much of the excess colour out as possible. 
8. Spin again!
12. Leave to dry, ideally hanging up outside somewhere
13. You may want to consider waterproofing with Fabsil or equivalent once it's dry

This is already way too long so I'm not going to provide any details on how I put the bits together into an awning, but here are some pictures of the finished article:

One of the strips of fabric drying. This was the first one I did and it only had one spiral.

The awning in place outside the bus. I've got a few refinements to make to improve the structure but I'm pretty pleased with it!