Tie Dye Movies

Not every fashion movie is a feature film. Tie dye is a craft learned by watching hands, and the two videos collected here are the clothing industry's tie dye lessons on film: Tie Dye 101, covering the basics of making exceptional tie dye, and Advanced Tie Dye Techniques, covering shapes and mandalas. Both are taught by Tom and Martine of True Tie Dye, who share their years of experience and guide viewers through every step of the tie-dyeing process.

Tie dyeing is fun, and these videos exist to make learning it easy — whether the goal is a garment to wear, a piece to hang on a wall, fabric to sew with, or gifts for family and friends.

Tie Dye 101: The Basics of Making Exceptional Tie Dye

Learn how to make outstanding tie dye of your own: wear it, hang it on your wall, sew with it, and give it away to family and friends. Throw a tie dye party, teach a camp or school art project, or even sell it. Tom and Martine guide you through every step in the tie-dyeing process — how to make fascinating patterns with vibrant colours that do not fade, even after repeated washings. The video helps you avoid the common pitfalls and shows you how to get professional-looking results every time; from beginner to pro, there are useful tips for everyone.

Advanced Tie Dye Techniques: Making Shapes and Mandalas

The advanced video, released in 2005, takes tie dye to the next level — and beyond. It promises the results you want using simple, proven techniques, all without stitching or expensive tools. Tom and Martine share their insights into the art: how controlled folding, binding and dye placement produce deliberate shapes and mandalas rather than happy accidents. Where the 101 video teaches the process, the advanced video teaches design — planning the pattern before the dye touches the cloth.

Tie Dye in Fashion

Tie dye sits at the crossing of craft and fashion history. Its swirled, saturated patterns are inseparable from hippie clothing — the retail hippie clothing directory linked below collects the stores — and from hemp clothing and the handmade garment trade, where no two pieces are alike and the process is the point. The tie dye definition in the definitions section explains the technique in words; these videos show it in motion, which for a process made of folds, twists and timings is the better teacher. Find more fashion movies and fashion reading through the fashion books directory and the fashion movies hub.

Why Video Teaches Tie Dye Best

Tie dye is a timed, physical process: how tightly a fold is bound, how long a garment sits in the dye, and the order in which colours are laid down decide the pattern, and none of those things survives translation into a paragraph as well as it survives a demonstration. That is why the craft's teaching tradition lives on video. Watching Tom and Martine's hands make a mandala fold once teaches more than a page of instructions, and a learner can pause, rewind and match their own folding to the film at the bench. The two videos on this page are ordered accordingly — process first, design second — and a beginner who works through both in order will finish able to plan a pattern, bind it, dye it and predict, roughly, what will come out of the rinse.

The same logic explains tie dye's place in a movies section at all. These are instruction films, closer to the workshop than the cinema — but for the clothing industry, the workshop film is a fashion movie of the most literal kind: a film about how a garment gets its look.

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The look on screen is a craft anyone can do at a kitchen table. The spiral shirts and sun-bright colors in these films come from folding, binding and dyeing cotton — our tie-dye patterns and techniques guide walks through the classic folds, the soda ash soak and the patient rinse, and dyeing clothes at home covers the wider craft of dyeing garments, fiber by fiber.