How to Prepare Fabric | Tie Dyeing

Watch more How to Tie Dye videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/510695-How-to-Prepare-Fabric-Tie-Dyeing I'm going to show you now how to prepare the fabric and how to dye it using the squeeze bottles. So first you want to prepare what we call the activator solution. And that will just be a solution with washing soda or soda ash. Normally you would mix 9 teaspoons per gallon of water , since I have a little bit less than a gallon of water I'm going to adapt my recipe and that's what you should do. Again I'm going to dissolve my washing soda into hot water because it doesn't like to be dissolved in cold water. So I'm going to add 3 teaspoons because I think I have a third of a gallon. And I'm going to make sure it's fully dissolved before adding my fabric to it. I'm just like whisking it to make sure it's fully dissolved. Soda ash or washing soda can be a little tricky and you don't want to enter your fabric before it's fully dissolved. I think now it's good actually. So I pre-wetted my fabric which is also like bundled for tie dying already. So make sure that you wet it and then you want to put it in the dye activator solution and let it sit from 5-10 minutes. So I'm just going to make sure it's fully immersed and then I'm going to wait 5 minutes before I take it out. After 5 minutes your fabric's soaked all of the activator solution that it needed so you can remove it from the activator solution and just wring the excess out. I'm wringing it out and I'm going to move my dye activator solution aside so I have a nice clean surface to dye. So then I prepared 3 colors in the squeeze bottles and I'm going to show you how then look. So I have the yellow that is pretty light. And I have a berry color that is actually pretty concentrated so I think will go well with the yellow. And there's also some green. I really like using the paper towels to test the colors. This is actually really useful too to see how the two colors will blend because just because the two c