After I Got Tired of Job Hunting, I Tie Dyed

The kids are back in school, the Hubs is back in his classroom, and I have the house to myself.

Sometimes you read about bloggers who get envious of other women's blogs, reading about their lives and seeing their wonderful pictures.  I don't feel that way very often, but I did get that feeling the other day while surfing around LinkedIn.  That is the site where workers post info about themselves professionally, and usually in a resume format.  So I have spent many hours the past two weeks looking up people with whom I've formerly worked, people who've interviewed me this summer, people with whom I will speak with soon, and people who know people of all these types listed.  And everyone has a great existing job and better career path than me it seems.

So one day I got sick of it, backed away from the computer, and tackled a tie dye project.  I went from no tie dye experience to owner of a tie dyed shirt in a matter of minutes.  I'm all spontaneous.

Actually I have had tie dye on the brain as something to do this summer along with the previously posted slip n' slide project.  I found some sites while Googling tie dye and I liked the idea of not having to buy anything to tie dye a shirt.  Of course I thought I'd do this project with at least one of my offspring but I ended up getting crafty alone.

Here's what I created alone in a matter of minutes:

First you go through your closet and drawers to find a black item of clothing.  I found this black t-shirt from Target.  You could use a different dark color if you wanted.

Then, to get this swirl pattern you put the shirt on the floor and use something like the handle of a butter knife or a dowel and place it in the middle of the shirt and slowly twirl it:

You then have all sorts of rubberbands ready.  When you take out your twirling instrument, you have to manually tuck around the sleeves.  Then you keep your shirt in the resulting pie shape and start wrapping rubberbands all around it like this:

Looks crazy, right?  I used maybe around twelve various-sized rubberbands.

Then I put a bucket into the sink and added bleach and warm water to it.  You want one part of bleach to 2 parts water.  So I just poured in the bleach to about an inch and eye-balled how much more water to add.  This is when I should have actually taken the show outside because the whole house smelled like bleach and the poor hamster may have gotten high from the fumes.  Learn from my impulsiveness.

Then you place your weird pie shaped, scrunched-up shirt into the bucket and jab it around with a utensil and flip it over.  Next thing I knew my shirt now looked brick-red and so was the water.  The shirt was submerged for about 7 minutes.  you wouldn't want it in any longer than that.  Five minutes may be best.

Take it out and rinse it off, removing the rubberbands in the sink.  I held it up and was most impressed with myself, and hung it outside to dry.

When the boys came home from school they were impressed too and the 13 year old and 10 year old want to try it.  Now I have a whole new plan of attack next time I visit the Goodwill.  Scarves!  Long sleeved shirts!  And there are other designs I'd like to try besides the swirl.

Here is where I got the idea and it has great photos--you just scroll halfway down page to click to each page.


And here is a site I just saw that shows how to fold the shirt like an accordian and then rubberband it bewteen two pieces of wood.

So, take that all you professionals on LinkedIn who are working at your great jobs right now as I sit here in my gym shorts, bra-less, eating a homemade, lemon-poppyseed muffin and getting ready to shower at noon.

P.S. I have moved up the rungs in my candidate-process for the good opportunity at the work from home job, after two-plus weeks of the recruiter getting back to me after my first two phone interviews with managers.  I have phone interview with head honcho in a couple days. Met with another good company this week and that went well too and am supposed to get called back in to meet the rest of the group.