Tie-dye is making a comeback. I see it everywhere. Shirts, jackets, hats, backpacks, and more. Most recently, I’ve seen the print on shoes, and they’re wildly popular.
With that popularity comes a hefty price tag.
But what if you could have that psychedelic style for cheap?
Well, you can. All you’ll need is some cheap white canvas shoes, some permanent markers, and some rubbing alcohol. Here’s how you do it.
To make a perfect tie-dye spiral, you’ll need permanent marker colors in pink, blue, yellow, purple, green, and orange.
You’ll begin with your yellow. Place a dot in the center of the shoe’s toe and make a spiral around the fabric.
Then, you’ll do the same with your pink marker. You’ll want to make this spiral right below the first one.
Then you’ll want to take out your blue marker and repeat that same step. Go right below the pink spiral and make a blue spiral.
You’ll then begin to fill your spirals. By using individual straight lines as strokes, fill in the gaps, leaving a small amount of space in between each color for your secondary colors.
Once you finish all of your strokes, use your secondary colors to fill in the gaps. Use orange between the pink and yellow, purple between the pink and blue, and green between the yellow and blue.
Be sure to go back and do the tongue of your shoe, following the colors of the spiral. so it matches as best as you can.
Then you’ll want to do the back of your shoe. YouTuber Scarlett Royal does the back of her shoe with the same technique, just using a half circle of each color to make it from the middle of the shoe to the back.
Finally, you want to bleed the colors together with your alcohol. Scarlett uses a paint brush for precision and control, starting with a dot in the center and then moving around the shoe with alcohol to blend the colors, dipping back in often.
You can use a black sharpie to create some borders if you choose, but I decided to leave them out of mine. I also sealed mine with a clear fabric spray to keep the colors in place.
Once that dries, you have tie dye shoes! The end result looks like a professional artist did it, and it’s so easy, I couldn’t believe it!
I’m going to be wearing mine all summer, and I can’t wait to show them off. Where are you going to wear yours first?