Tie-dying onesies

This is my friend Lauren.

Lauren is also pregnant, due Aug. 31. She and her husband have decided, like us, they will wait until the baby is born to find out boy or girl. We're not alone!

When you aren't finding out what you're having, you tend to acquire fewer clothes than people who know the baby's gender. Andrew and I are fine with this--we've stocked up on a few essential gender-neutral outfits in newborn and 0-3 months to get us through the first few days. Neither of us has a problem with our baby wearing basic white onesies either.

However, I decided it would be fun to tie-dye some onesies so my baby has a few things with color. Lauren was game because she'll be in the same boat very soon.

After checking the Internet on how to actually tie-dye things (pretty sure I haven't done this since Girl Scouts), we decided buying a kit would be the best plan. We wouldn't have eight pots of different colors, and onesies are so tiny, dipping the separate sections might be difficult. We picked up a Tulip kit at Walmart with five colors of dye, five squeeze bottles, instructions, lots of gloves and rubber bands for $20, so $10 each. We made around 12 onesies and have extra dye packets for a rainy day.

We used the guide to pick out the different "techniques" we wanted to try, then banded up our bright white onesies indoors.

We moved outside to do the actual tie-dying. Here are some pics of the wet, dyed onesies:

I definitely don't remember this part from whenever I last tie-dyed, but apparently you should wrap whatever you dyed in cling wrap to keep everything damper longer. After a certain amount of time (I got busy and didn't do this for 24 hours....woops) you unbind the material and rinse it in warm water until the water runs clear. I guess I used a TON of dye because this step took me forever. I would get all of the outfits rinsed, then go back and start again only to find more color in the tub! The purple was the worst. I finally finished, then threw them in the washing machine and hung them up to dry.

A few of my finished onesies! We'll definitely have one colorful baby!

**A question for those of you in Western Mass: can you get snow cones in New England? Lauren's from Texas, and I'm from Alabama--we both grew up with snow cone shacks all over the place, and when dying these outfits, we realized squeezing dye onto fabric reminded us of how snow cones are made. We then realized we've not had a snow cone since moving up here! Do these delicious treats exist in this part of the country? If you know, comment so I can no longer be deprived!