Tie Dye Machine
10. Industrial Design
Automating a manual craft.
Tie dye is a textile crafting process that involves selectively binding and dyeing fabric to create colorful patterns. This process is entirely made by hand and very demanding on the body.
How tie dye is made.
Tie dye involves folding, twisting, or crumpling a fabric before tightly binding the folded sections with rubber bands, string, or other materials. The bound fabric is then dyed, either by soaking or dipping it in dye, which allows the dye to penetrate and color the unbound portions of the fabric while leaving the bound areas white. After dyeing, the bindings are removed to reveal the patterned designs created by the resistance of the bound areas to the dye. Finally, the fabric is washed and dried which sets and stabilizes the dye colors.
Taking the work out of tie dye.
The manual process of folding, binding, dyeing, rinsing and unbinding fabric repeatedly can be physically strenuous, especially for large projects. Therefore, we created a tie dye machine that can be operated using a foot pedal, similar to a traditional spinning wheel. The pedal rotates a spinning wheel via a belt, which winds a string around the fabric fed through the wheel. The foot pedal controls the speed of the wheel which makes the spinning thread tighter and looser and creates the different effects of a tie dye.
