Exploring my inner "wild child"

What were you doing in the 60's? It was the decade of love, peace, halucenogenics, free love, the Dead, Beatles, burning bras, protest...you name it! What were you doing? For me, I graduated from an all girls "convent" school, went to college for a year and a half, got married, and spent the rest of the decade "birthin' those babies!"

No wild parties for me, smoking made me throw up, I did have a few too many drinks at times, but once I became a mother, the wild life was given over for Sunday School classes and bridge games. B-O-O-O-R-I-N-G!

Now many know the 60's by several iconic symbols. One was the peace symbol, the circle with the upside down Y in it. The other was tie dyed t-shirts! The Grateful Dead were popular (or was that the 70's? Bro, help me out here!) and with them came the tie dye phenomena. The wild child usually was wearing one of these icons to identify them as someone VERY DIFFERENT.

So, in costuming Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, I chose this iconic color scheme to camp up the Canaan scene, circa 1000 BC.

First I had to make the clothing to be tie dyed. It took 40 yards of white muslin to make the skirts. The shirts were easier to come by, 5 for $10 at Walgreens! They were all 100% cotton, just what we needed and at a price we couldn't pass up.

Then we needed to plan the tie dyeing session. What fun that was! The one thing I knew I didn't want is dye all over my house. So we did it in the back yard, where we could use the hose to wash things off, and we just dumped our rinse water on some plants to make them extra colorful. We laid them all out on the lawn to dry off a little and stop dripping then hung them up to dry. They turned out very nice, and we got so enthused about the project that we went back to Walgreens for 5 more shirts, so we could make some for ourselves. What fun.


Beautiful skirt for some lucky Canaan lady

My neighbors wanted to see what we were doing when they saw this array laying on the lawn!

The only thing that is problematic about this whole process is that the cheesy rubber gloves we used were less protection to our hands than we wanted. So I'll have to wait for a week or two before the evidence of my tie dyeing session wears off my hands. Oh, and my feet are decorated also! But it was a lot of fun exploring my INNER WILD CHILD!