Why is tie-dye a thing?

The designs on the shirt never reflect the bright and bold colors promised on the “hot to” kit.  No matter how much effort is put into carefully placing the dye, there will be patches of white, and areas where every color mixed becomes poop-shaded brown.  And after one or two washes, the shirt that cost $15 and way too many hours to create will fade so that instead of psychedelic and cool, you have back of the pajama drawer.

And those are just some of the problems with the actual tie-dye clothing.  That doesn’t even get into the fact that your hands, with or without protective gloves, will be a new shade of puke green or washed blood red for the following week.  At least one drop of dye will splash onto whatever piece of clothing you were trying to protect the most.  And The rinsing buckets will forever be multicolored inside as they are now useless for carrying water that needs to look (or even better be) clean.

Despite all of these flaws, and these are only the ones I could come up with while gagging at the picture above, camps, youth groups, and school carnivals continue to resurrect this messy “art” form.

If you really and truly need a splash of rainbow mess in your wardrobe, I suggest just letting a small child attack a t-shirt with some sharpies.  The kid will have more fun for less cost, and you will still probably get a few extra items destroyed in the process.

Sigh. Its nice to rant about something completely and utterly unimportant when the world is spinning sideways.   And I’d much rather get into a Twitter war about ugly colors than nuclear disarmament or ethnic fragility.  Those topics are better over chai tea. 🙂

#52sparks is my year-long writing series based on an art prompt challenge.  The title is inspired by a quote from Star Wars: The Last Jedi: “We are the spark, that will light the fire that’ll burn the First Order down” (Poe Dameron).  The spark that lights a fire to toast a marshmallow or to ravage a forest begins in the space of an inch.  So just imagine what hundreds of inches and words can do.