I decided to go ahead with my second batch of tie dye on Monday. I still don’t feel confident enough to work on the nice clothing blanks I purchased, plus I’m waiting for my soy wax flakes to arrive so I can do some batik on them, so I decided to continue experimentation with my prefold diapers. I know people dye them solid colors all the time, but I’ve never seen someone tie dye them. Now, maybe there’s a good reason for that, I don’t know.

I was afraid that the thickness of the diapers would prove to be problematic, but it wasn’t as much of a problem as I’d anticipated it being. What I hadn’t anticipated was how difficult the super absorbency of the diapers would make the process!

This is easily one of my favorites. It’s a flat-fold diaper, folded into a flag fold, held in place by chopsticks, and then dyed. I had intended to dye this one yellow and red, but it was the last one I did and I was all out of already-mixed red dye, so I just did yellow. It occurred to me afterwards that dying a cloth diaper a mottled yellow might not be the way to go, but I do like how it turned out. See the smudge of blue there? More on that later.

This first one here is a preemie size, I tied it up, then rolled it in some spilled yellow in a really random pattern, then applied the red dye. Not my favorite. The second one was Shibori style, but the diaper’s thickness really came into play here, with the dye being unable to penetrate down to the bottom layers. I will probably overdye this later.

The fourth one is accordion-folded with red and yellow dyes overlapping. Wally helped with this one and squirted red in a few places where it wasn’t supposed to go, but it’s not bad looking overall. The last one I love, except for that wayward spot of blue near the bottom. Again, more on that in the next post.