Pippi Longstocking’s Funky Tie Dye Socks- Sweden

Pippi Longstocking known as Pippi Långstrump was written by a Swedish author named Astrid Lindgren. I remember reading Pippi Longstocking when I was young…and I thought it would be fun to tie her into our Swedish craft for Around the World in 12 Dishes.

If you’ve seen Pippi…you known her usual style is to wear a short patchwork dress, oversized shoes and mismatched thigh-high stockings. For this craft, my kids designed some Tie-dye mismatched socks, using the same tie-dye technique we’ve seen pinned on Pinterest. (Like this one here on Art & Craft Tutorials)

Supplies:

Permanent markers (sharpies) in a variety of colors.
Cotton fabric…we used socks because of our Around the World project…but t-shirts would be fun too!
Isopropyl alcohol (we used 70%)
Q-Tips, eye dropper, or a spray bottle (the kids enjoyed the spray bottle more…however you want to closely monitor them so they don’t spray alcohol everyone…or at each other).
A cup or glass
Rubber bands

Directions:

Stretch your sock or t-shirt over the cup and secure it with a rubber band.

Then get your permanent markers….

And start drawing a nice pattern on the cloth.

Once your design is complete, add a few drops of isopropyl alcohol onto the drawing and watch the color spread. I need to buy another eye dropper….so we improvised with Q-tips instead.

This worked well…but took some time. So then we decided to use a spray bottle.

The spray bottle worked much better…but please note that it is important to closely supervise the little ones (you don’t want them to accidentally spray themselves or any other person in the face).

Each time the kids are done with a section…just undo the rubber band and move it to another white section…and repeat the process.

Here are our completed tie-dye socks! The kids had a great time creating these. Next time we’ll have to make tie-dye shirts. Because the socks had ridges in it, I felt like it was a little harder for the colors to spread, but they still turned out great! And the most important thing was that the kids had fun designing these socks.