For one of our September after school programs, we thought it would be fun and cool for the students to have different ways to decorate t-shirts and let them be creative!
I had 20 children attend, and 3 total librarians working the program. There were a few moms/grandmas that also came out to help and that was *awesome*!
I asked that parents/guardians register their children in advance so that I knew how much dye to make and markers and stuff to purchase, but the library did not provide the t-shirts. It was made clear in the flier that students were expected to bring their own, and I called everyone on my sign up list the day before to remind them. That part went over really well! I always get a little nervous when we require things like that, but making sure I had all the right t-shirt sizes would have been a lot, and I would have felt terrible if someone ended up without a shirt and it was my fault. It was way easier to have them bring their own!
They had three options for decorating:
- Tie dye
- Fabric marker/paint freehand
- Iron on design and color with fabric markers/paint
For the Tie Dye:
Tie dye was the *only* thing they could do if they chose this option. Since the dye would still be wet, it wasn’t possible to do an iron on design or to paint/draw after the tie dying was done. Some of them had a hard time with this, and it meant they were done really early.
But we had a whole table for the rubber banding process, and a table outside to do the tie dye. They were told they MUST put gloves on as soon as they were finished with the rubber bands, before they even stepped outside to the tie dye table.
Tie dye kits are expensive, so I followed this how-to on how to tie dye for cheap! It uses the following ingredients:
Rit dye
Water (hot- I ran water through the Keurig to heat it and it was HOT)
Salt
Applicator bottles/spray bottles
**Personal recommendation!!** If you take a cookie sheet and put a cooling rack on top of it, the extra dye drips down onto the cookie sheet and you won’t accidentally set your t-shirt into a puddle of dye! It worked great!
Once the tie dyeing was complete, T-shirts were placed into a gallon sized bag and their name was written on it to take home!
For the iron on designs:
I have one of those Cricut crafting machines and it makes my job a zillion times easier. For this particular program, it was a HUGE hit. I purchased iron on vinyl sort of in bulk from Amazon, and using the machine, I was able to cut out tons of designs that would iron right onto the shirts!
I will say, the unicorns and LEGO guys went the quickest but most all of them got used!
A regular iron would work to transfer this, but I have a heat press, so I brought that to use. It made it a little easier, and that way I could guarantee that I got the whole design at once (some were larger than iron-sized) and that I could press it for ~30 seconds and it would be good to go! I kept the heat press in the back room and had them line up (a few in the room and a few outside) so that I could get their designs ironed on.
Once I got that done, they were free to decorate however they chose! We had fabric paint and markers available, so most of them essentially turned theirs into a t-shirt coloring page!
There were a few who chose to freehand draw on their shirts with markers/paint but for the most part it was a pretty even split between the tie dye and the iron on. It was the perfect number of students for this involved of a program!
I’ve gotten a few messages/notes from parents about how much their child loves their shirt and it makes my heart grow three sizes each time. I am SO thrilled that they had such a good time and I hope to see them wearing their t-shirts to school!
Miss Meg's Library 