The Real Question: Who Will Tie-Dye Whom?

You may think, if you contemplate a tie-dye project with your preschoolers, that the obvious question is "what should we tie-dye today?" but I am here to tell you the truth. Because the fact of the matter is that what to tie-dye is pretty obvious: t-shirts are the simplest (though you should do the extra five minutes of work to buy 100% cotton ones, since they will take the dye much better than the cotton/polyester blend ones). I suggest that you get more t-shirts than one per child, or be prepared to let your kids do one each for the grown-ups in the family, or think creatively about what else you might be willing to sacrifice to Ganja Fashion, since the process of dyeing one shirt is too fast to satisfy the degree of anticipation leading up to it.

When to tie-dye is also easy to answer: whenever you need an excellent distraction for your three-year-old to keep her from messing with all the tiny orange bandaids plastered over her torso to cover up the skin treatment effected by the pediatrician that morning. Or any time you are hankering to clean up endless amounts of highly-staining product from every available horizontal and vertical surface in your kitchen/bathroom. Duh.

How to tie-dye is easy or complex, depending on your skill level and patience. You can find tons of great information about twists and dyeing methods here. Given children's desire just to squirt vast amounts of dye at fabric willy nilly, however, I am of the opinion that a few basic folds/twists/rubber band methods is all you need.

With what dye to tie-dye is controversial. (Who knew?) There are the fabric dying purists who will tell you that Rit and other brands of cheap and easily accessible dye will not really "stick" permanently to your fabric without boiling the garments in the dye for a solid 3o minutes, and even then will be prone to fading. Of course, you can boil the t-shirts for half an hour if you want. But that sort of negates the kid value of the project, since allowing small children to use long wooden paddles to stir clothes in large boiling vats pretty much went out of fashion with the advent of the washing machine. Not to mention the fact that the boiling pot method only allows you to dye a shirt with one color -- and what kid do you know who will be happy with that?

The purists thus recommend ordering "real" cold-water dyes online from specialty shops, so that the children can have a party of squirting many colored dyes at t-shirts. But that kind of ordering takes much longer than is permissible if you've been promising a tie-dye project to your five year old for two weeks and really MUST make good on it this morning. And quite frankly, if you're not planning to stock a new Etsy shop full of fabulous tie-dyed creations, I'm pretty sure the cheap "Groovy Tie-Dye Kits" at craft stores (on sale for $6.99!) are just fine for your purposes. (Sorry, purists.)

So that's what we bought yesterday morning. And we did okay by our t-shirts, if I do say so myself.

The best question to ask of any tie-dye project, then, is: who will tie-dye whom, and where? Daughter started it off by unceremoniously plunking her compactly coiled t-shirt into a bowl of her favorite dye and effectively splashing Son's chest with boiling hot pink spots. Then Son managed to dribble something onto his chair and dye a nice blue streak down his knee. Then Daugher leaned into the table while making Daddy's shirt and covered her whole naked belly with blue and green. Then Mama's glove leaked and produced two magenta fingertips. Then Daughter's thoroughly dyed hands left a perfect green fingerprint on the bridge of her nose. We washed and scrubbed, showered and lathered, but apparently even the cheap "will hardly stick to your fabric" versions of dye do an incredibly good job of staining skin.

Hence, my children will be heading to daycare this morning proudly sporting their new shirts. And I will have to make my excuses for the bruise-like amoebas decorating vast swaths of their bodies. (Here's a tip: instead of thinking that asking them to take off their good shirts is a great idea because they won't accidentally dye them, try asking them to put on a painting smock so that they don't dye their skin.)

And if you've made it this far in this post, I can offer you a bonus tip that has nothing to do with crafting or messes. If you have a hard time remembering when to use who or whom in a sentence, just remember the key question here: Who will tie-dye whom? Who is always the subject of a sentence or clause. Whom is always the object. The easiest way to remember this is that you use who anywhere you would use he or she, and you use whom anywhere you would use him or her. He would tie-dye her, or she would tie-dye him, but him would not tie-dye she. Get it?

Just don't go thinking that at your house no one would tie-dye him or her because that is a fantasy that is simply incompatible with putting dye into the hands of any little he or she in your house.