Sharing the Tie Dyed Hippy Experience

Besides all the time spent actually creating the products and reveling in the unveiling of a new and awesome wearable art design, there's a LOT to all this 21st century information highway sharing of my every move in the tie-dye world.

I am a BIG fan of automation since whatever I have to REMEMBER to do, but can have set up to do automatically will have a better chance of actually getting DONE. So I'm all for the scheduled blog posts and the zen-cart mods that will auto tweet and auto Facebook our new products.

I have taken it a step further and have NetworkedBlogs app on FB set up to take my blog posts and share them on my FB profile page. And at YouTube, when I upload a new video, it's shared with Facebook and Twitter.

There is a slight drawback to all this. Seems I can't make a peep without my every little move being broadcast across the net, instantly reaching out to the masses.

I found out just what a drawback this can be yesterday when I was trying to create a demo video at Screen Toaster about how to add a product to a zen-cart. I made a test product (luckily it was priced at $1000 so nobody would jump all over it) and added it to my zen-cart.

Within less than a minute I was IM'd by my sister/fellow hippy tie-dye partner who was laughing that I was trying to sell "Test Product" for a grand. Of course, I am such a space cadet that I had forgotten all the nifty instant/automated sharing contraptions I had set up and just scratched my head uttering a clueless "huh?" in response. That didn't help, since, as I said, we were IMing and she didn't hear me.

Then my heart skipped a beat as the few remaining synapses in my brain left untouched by my MS connected in a panic and the red lights flashed and all I could think of was "you can't un-ring a bell!!!"

Luckily you CAN delete a Facebook post and a Twitter tweet, so that's what I went and did, hoping that anyone who saw Test Product for sale would realize I wasn't selling something from my separate and compartmentalized alter ego who is currently undergoing scrutinization in a clinical trial .

So yes, the sharing is cool, and it gathers people to unite as one in a sharing web of experience, but it can also be a major PITA if you don't remember this stuff. Thank goodness I didn't use a really weirdly funny title or something that would be even more embarrassing to have shared. :P (no, I'm not giving examples).

If I could remember how I got everything set up to do all this automated stuff, I might write a really useful post about how you can also do this. Quite honestly, though, I was stumped at first about how my test product got to Facebook without any help from me. Scary to know the ship is sailing but there's nobody at the helm.

Welcome to my world. It's no wonder all my tie-dyes are one of a kind. I can't remember how I do them.

Sneak Peek Video Preview of Soon To Be Listed Tie Dye from www.tiedyedhippy.com

Here's a video of our latest stuff, including the pink/purple shirt from the earlier post showing how it was made in the low water immersion technique of hand-dying.




All of these shirts will be listed soon -- hopefully over the weekend depending on when we can get the still photos shot and the ads written. Stay tuned!

Results of the Spiral Low Water Immersion Tie-Dye Experiment

Earlier I showed you the pictures of the process where I made a spiraled t-shirt and put it in a bucket and added fuschia and purple dyes. As I promised, I would show you the end result. Here's the video version, but hopefully we will have some really awesome stills to show you because my sister has the *good* camera.

This video was shot in the bathroom (I know, I know, but this house is so DARK and that was the best light, believe it or not) and it came out kind of yellowish. It doesn't do the purple/pink tie-dyed spiral shirt (from the previous post) any justice at all.

More Low Water Immersion Designs

I just can't get over the child-like fascination I have with seeing the results of a Low Water Immersion experiment. The result is always a pleasure, never a disappointment, and more often than not results in something worthy of adding to our www.TieDyedHippy.com website for sale.

Today I am using shades of purple and a weak fuschia I think. I have noticed that I have some favorite color combinations and I have to be careful not to use them all the time, lest our wares be only shades that appeal to me.

I have 1 hour exactly before I have to get my son from the bus stop, so let's get started...

First I spin some spirals into a Hanes Men's Large t-shirt that has been prewashed and is still damp.

 Next, I lift it up using magic and slide it into the bucket crammed down into the bottom. This happens to be a 2 gallon bucket.

Next, I apply the dyes that I just mixed but didn't photo-document. A weak fuschia, a light purple and dark purple:

Then I let all that sit in the bucket for long enough to upload these photos, crop them write the accompanying text including this paragraph, before I move on to the next step. (This took about 10-15 min.)

Then the soda ash I have pre-mixed that I keep in a 1 gal. milk jug gets poured on. Enough to only barely (or not quite) submerge the shirt. Hence the "low water" part of the method title. heh

Now, let the magic commence! I know it doesn't look like much in the bucket, but let me tell ya!... something amazing is happening in there.

Now we leave it to go run some errands and maybe when I come back I'll poke it with a gloved finger a couple of times to interfere with the process going on and to change the destiny of the final design. I do that because that's just the kind of meddlesome person that I am. :P

Next post we will have rinsed, washed and dried the shirt above and I will show you how it came out. Unlike a lot of How-To's for tie dye that just seem to show you the before pictures and a suspiciously different "after" shot that only tells me they didn't like the direction the original sample was taking. I know that we all do duds sometimes and it can be very disappointing, but we live and learn.

This is the first multiple spiral shirt I have done, as I am a big fan of the one huge dramatic spiral, but every now and then you have to change things up and live on the edge. This is my "hang 10" for the day.

Stay tuned for the finished shirt...

Sunrise at TieDyedHippy.com

Hippies notoriously sleep in, don't they? So a Hippy Sunrise should occur about half past the crack of noon, right? Well, that's not what we're talking about here anyhow so forget it, man!

We're talking about the new Sunrise pattern tie-dye that's for sale at www.TieDyedHippy.com. See?

Sunrise Tie-Dye pattern

This is such an awesome design that we are going to be adding other color combos above the sun like yellow/orange, red/black, greens, etc.

The one above is a Sunrise Pleated Tie-Dye Pattern Yellow Red Design Men's L Tee 
and is currently for sale!