Eden Richman Week 2 - Avocado Tie Dye

     This week I pretty much spent the entire week on my avocado tie-dye project. For a bit of background information, for about a month or so I have been saving all of the avocado peels and pits in my freezer until I had about a gallon-sized ziplock bag full of them (I eat a lot of avocados). I saw a video on the internet saying that avocado peels and pits give off a pink dye that people use to color clothing. I decided to try this out.  The first step was boiling the avocado peels and pits in water and it looked disgusting. When I tell you it looked disgusting I mean it. Then we (me and my sister) poured the water through a strainer so we would just be left with the liquid. At this point, I wasn't very confident that this would work, because the water looked completely brown while it was meant to be pink. But we kept on going because we were far too into it to stop. We had to soak the things we wanted to tie-dye in a water and vinegar solution, and then I twisted up the tank top I was tie-dying into the generic tie-dye twist pattern. Then we had to put our clothes into the pot of brown water, and let it soak overnight. I went to bed, got up, and we waited until the end of the day to take the clothes out. We had to then let them out it the sun to dry. Apparently, the drying is where the magic happens. where the brown turns to pink, and where the ugly tank top I just ruined turns into something that is not a disappointment. What happens in the sun is that the parts of the shirt that are being hit by the sun directly, turn dark pink, while the parts that are not completely being hit by the sun turn light pink. With my tank top in the spiral pattern, it dried in a way that made it really look like real tie-dye. I washed it, and it actually turned out pretty nice. 

    Would I say that I am surprised that this worked? No. But would I be surprised if it didn't? No. This is the reason that I chose something that I didn't really care about. Now I feel confident enough to say that I would use this method to dye something that held more value to me. It was very cool to see that pink color come out of an avocado, and I am still baffled by how it worked. I would completely recommend this to someone with the time and patience to do it. One thing I would recommend is not to use a gallon-sized ziplock full of avocados. I had so much dye leftover and now it is sitting in my outside freezer because I couldn't bring myself to put it down the drain. But now if I ever want to make tie-dye again I have it easily accessible to me! 😊🥑 would you try avocado tie-dye?