Modern Tie Dye kit for kids (or hippies)Hey, I know tie-dye. Tie-dye involves buckets, little boxes of dye, and an unholy mess, right?

Not anymore, actually. Welcome to 2009, and the Jacquard Products Tie Dye Kit. The dye gets mixed in squirt bottles, the soda ash for pre-soaking your shirts makes the colors super-vibrant, there’s gloves and rubber bands and, oh yeah, an instructional DVD. Go ahead and laugh, but my daughter and her friends watched the entire thing and then they made some professional-looking shirts. (My son and his friends opted to skip the DVD; their shirts came out pretty well, too– with a bit of guidance from those who’d watched it.) It’s like a Grateful Dead tour up in my house, people.

One kit dyes up to 15 shirts (we did nine and had plenty of leftover dye) which makes it a great kids’ party activity, and unlike every other time I’ve done tie-dye before, if you follow the instructions, the shirts really are colorfast after the washout and run through the dryer. Now that’s groovy. -Mir

Get your Jacquard Tie Dye Kit from Amazon.