Tie-Dye

Tie-dye is a resist pattern made by binding, folding, knotting, or stitching cloth so that dye cannot reach the bound areas, leaving them pale against the dyed ground. The technique is ancient and grew up independently around the world, in the bandhani of India, the shibori of Japan, the adire of West Africa, and the textiles of pre-Columbian Peru. The swirling, multicolored spiral that the word now calls to mind in the West is a much more recent thing, the badge of 1960s American counterculture, where rediscovered resist dyeing became a homemade emblem of psychedelia.