Patriotic Tie Dye Tutorial. My first tutorial ever!

Ok so, just like the title says this my first tutorial...ever.  So here goes!

This summer I decided to do tie dye with my girls, one of which I knew I wanted red white and blue.  After browsing through Pinterest for ideas I decided to combine a few things I saw.  While it didn't work out quite as well as I hoped, here it is.

I decided to attempt a glue resist.  The goal, white stars surrounded by blue on the top part of the shirt.  I found a free star template by googling star images.  I printed it out on card stock and just cut staggering stars out for a flag like pattern.

I've been following diy baby carrier and dyeing groups so I finally worked up the nerve to try it on a shirt.  Washable school glue and a washable marker in hand, I was ready.  I just grabbed the blue.  It doesn't really matter because it will wash out completely.

The white shirts were presoaked on soda ash(or in my case washing soda).  Then hung up to dry.  Here is the smallest shirt with stars traced and ready for glue. I decided to stop the stars and the blue at about the arm pits of the shirt.

Close up of a traced star.

Then fill in with glue!  And let them dry.

Here is a photo of a bunch of stars after they are dry!

Now we are ready to do the "tying". First I laid the shirt out flat.

Second I folded it in half...

 Then I did an accordion fold on the bottom of the shirt.

 I put the first rubber band on to mark the end of the blue.

 Then a rubber band was added for each strip.  In an effort to keep them even I used a match book for stripe width. It was with in reach and seemed like a good width.

 I continued adding rubber bands to mark all the strips.

 After that I scrunched the top together and

 then put some loose rubber bands around that.

 Shirts ready for dyeing!

 Just before dyeing I dipped them in a soda ash solution to wet them and rung them out.  Here are our shirts with one side dyed.

 After you put dye on one side you flip them and dye the other side. Really make sure you get in all the creases. Wrap in plastic and let it sit in the sun, leave it for around 24 hours.

 Time to rinse!

 Here is the first shirt, as you can see I didn't get in the creases very well.

 The girls liked them.

 I ended up redyeing them because there was too much white for my taste.  Here we are modeling them on the 4th.  The glue ended up not keeping the dye from dying the parts were I put it, and it also didn't come out of the shirts.  After I finished the shirts I found some people saying the batching often sets the glue so it doesn't come out.  Whoops! Hopefully the stars will break down with wear?

I hope you enjoyed my first ever tutorial, at least the kids are cute...right?