Tie-Dye to Die For!
A how-to tie-dye tu-torial from a titan of the technique
Austin Mackereth’s @dyes_n_goodvibes Instagram account is part acid trip, part optical illusion, part pop-culture tribute and 100% incredible. He takes the familiar technique of tie-dyeing — that gorgeously messy, kaleidoscopic craft — and turns it into ultra-precise, geometric art. It all started when he picked up the hobby as a teenager; he eventually started selling tie-dyed shirts online, and then quit his electrician job to make the side gig permanent. The Boss and I sent Wondercade HQ’s cub reporter Aaron Cohen (he’s our summer intern, and although we asked him to drop out of college and join the staff, he’s headed back to school — we’re disappointed, but his parents are not) to dig up Austin’s secrets, and share them with you.
Aaron Cohen: Hi Austin. You’re the internet’s king of tie-dye. As Neil told me on Day 1 of my internship, Wondercade loves artisans who love their crafts. How’d this become your passion?
Austin Mackereth: I didn’t really become obsessed with it until I did it when I was 19. My buddy brought home a tie-dye kit. I tried it out and for some reason it just clicked in my brain and I wanted to do it all the time. I’ve never stopped.
AC: Your work is so precise. I’m guessing you like to make a statement when you walk into a room in one of your shirts.
AM: 95% of the time I wear all black! Mainly because I’m working all the time — there’s technically a ton of dye in all of my black clothes. Black is basically a painter’s smock to me.
AC: Can you share your tips for tie-dye newbies?
AM: Sure. My whole style, personally, is just a combination of every style I’ve learned over the last 9 years, and then figuring out unique ways to put them together:
1. Use shirts that are 100% natural. Cotton, or even bamboo or silk. Dye doesn’t properly bond to fibers that aren’t 100% natural. If a shirt is 20% or 30% polyester, it’ll work, but you’ll get white lines or dots, or the colors will be a lot paler than they would be normally.
2. Pre-soak your shirt in soda ash in a bucket of distilled water (one cup of ash per gallon). This helps bond the dye to the shirt’s fiber.
3. You could get a tie-dye kit from Walmart, or you could get professional dye from Dharma Trading, Pro Chemical or Grateful Dyes. If you’re trying to do classic, traditional, liquid tie-dye, I would get all of the primary colors.
4. Using distilled water to mix the dye is very important, because the dyes will bond to any impurities in the water before they even get to the fabric. For most colors, it’s basically a teaspoon of dye per ounce of water, but be sure to read the directions on the packaging.
5. For a traditional spiral, just pinch from the center of the shirt with your fingers and twist the whole thing. Then tie it together using kite string, artificial sinew, fishing line or rubber bands — around the twist so that it looks like triangular pizza slices or wheel spokes.
6. For dyeing, I use two-ounce needle-tip applicator bottles. For that traditional spiral, dye each triangle individually.
7. Make sure to not over-saturate as you apply the dye! If you use too much it can bleed into the next areas on the shirt.
8. To get that traditional spiral, flip the shirt over, and dye the back side with a different color from what was on the front side.
9. Let your dyed (and still tied) shirt sit in a bag — plastic shopping bag, trash bag, whatever — for 24 hours. If you’re impatient, 12 is fine.
10. After that, untie the shirt and wash it with cold water in the sink until the water runs clear.
11. Boil the shirt in an aluminum or steel pot. The shirt may still be holding dye, and you can release it with extreme heat. I do it two or three times. Blues tend to bleed longer. Sometimes I boil it up to 8 times.
AC: Great tips for us novices. You make it sound so easy — how do you get your designs so precise and geometric?
AM: I use protractors and rulers. There’s a lot of math involved before the shirt is tied — different angles and pleat distances and things like that. A lot of it is experimenting, tinkering, and trial and error. It’s almost natural to me at this point, because I’ve definitely got my 10,000 hours in. I recently made a piece called “The Reveal”; it’s in the style of stencil graffiti. It’s a guy wearing a hoodie, and he’s peeling back the shirt, so there’s a three-dimensional, meta aspect to it. It was really difficult to pull off.
AC: I bet! There are tons of pop-culture references, too — personally, I love the Pokémon.
AM: I do a lot of cartoon stuff. The free time I do have is usually at like 2 a.m., so a lot of my designs are based on the cartoons that I put on late at night, like The Simpsons and South Park. More recently, I’ve been making designs that mean something to me emotionally, or were inspired by real events in my life.
AC: We can see that — your creations are dripping with passion. Not literally, as you’ve expertly sealed the dye.
AM: [Laughs] Once I started, I’ve made sure that I’ve always been able to tie-dye. I’ve had intense labor jobs — I was an electrician, I’ve dug trenches and dug up fields, wired houses — and no matter how exhausted I was, I’d still come home every single day and tie-dye. It’s all I want to do.
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