We just got back from a family vacation in BC – 1 home, 18 people (8 adults/10kids) and 7 days of endless fun! Okay, not every part of it was fun. There were definitely moments when the kids had too much sun and not enough sleep, but we managed and really did have such a great time together.
We did lots of things throughout the week, but one of my favorite activities was making tie-dye towels with all the kids!
Our original plan was to do tie-dye shirts, but we never got around to picking them all up before the trip.
Once we were in BC, we drove around to a few stores where we were staying to see if we could find enough white shirts for all the kids, but we had no luck.
Then we thought – why not towels?
Thank goodness for Amazon Prime because they showed up the very next day and we were able to get them done before the end of our trip.
Honestly, I think the towels ended up being even better. The kids will be able to use them for much longer than they would have used the shirts, and now they have a fun keepsake from our trip.
My sister had brought an awesome tie-dye kit from Amazon with her and my mom had a few extra bottles of dye left over from another kit, so we had lots of colours for the kids to choose from.
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What We Used
- Amazon Tie-Dye Kit
- Felt-backed tablecloth
- 24” x 48” white bath towel
- Scotch Painter’s Tape
- Large Ziplock bags
- Water/hose for rinsing
How We Made Our Tie-Dye Towels
There are obviously lots of ways to tie-dye! This is just the way we made this project work with 10 kids on a beach.
We took everything down to the beach where we had access to a hose. It gave us lots of room to spread out and it made the mess/cleanup so much easier.
Following the directions from the tie-dye kit, we filled all the dye bottles with water.
We laid a felt-backed tablecloth down on the beach to help catch some of the spills and keep the rocks/sand off the towels. We worked with a couple of towels at a time so it didn’t get too chaotic.
The adults used painter’s tape to make letters and simple designs on each towel before handing them over to the kids.
For the first few towels we tried some of the traditional elastic-band tie-dye designs following the directions in the kit. The kids then used the dye to soak the different sections of their towels.
The towels definitely used more dye than we expected! They soak up a lot more than a T-shirt would, so if you’re doing this with a group, I’d recommend having some extra dye on hand.
We quickly realized just how much dye that method used. With 10 kids making towels, we needed to make sure we had enough dye to go around, so we switched things up for the rest of them.
Instead of tying up the towels, we laid them flat, added the painter’s tape designs and let the kids use different colors of dye to splatter, spray and create whatever designs they wanted.
It may not have been the traditional way to tie-dye, but the kids had so much fun with it.
Letting The Dye Set
Once each child was finished adding dye, we balled up their towel and placed it inside a large Ziploc bag.
We left the towels in the bags overnight to let the dye set. Our kit suggested around 6–8 hours, but ours ended up sitting longer than that and it didn’t cause any problems for our towels.
The next morning, I pulled each towel out of its bag and removed all of the painter’s tape.
Using the hose at the beach, I rinsed each towel really well to get as much of the extra dye out as I could.
We then put all of the towels into the washing machine using a deep-fill, cold-water and extra-rinse cycle with a mild laundry detergent.
Once they were washed, we dried them in the dryer on medium heat.
My sister also tried tie-dyeing a white bucket hat and it turned out so cute! I think hats might have to be our next family tie-dye project.
What Worked — And What Didn’t
The towels were a huge hit with the kids. They absolutely loved seeing how their designs turned out!
We learned that the painter’s tape designs didn’t show up very well on the towels where we used the traditional elastic-band tie-dye method.
It may have worked better if we had completely saturated the towels with more dye, but with 10 kids sharing our supplies, we had to ration how much dye everyone used.
Towels use up a lot more dye than t-shirts.
The painter’s tape worked much better when we laid the towels flat and let the kids splatter and spray the dye instead.
And really, they didn’t need to be perfect.
This may not have been the most “traditional” tie-dye project, but it was such a fun memory from our trip — and now each of the kids has a towel they can actually use and a keepsake from our first-ever family vacation with all of their cousins.
