by Ashley McGee |

Sitting among a mountain of plain white t-shirts and bottles of dye, the first drop of rain hit me like a slap in the face. After a week of gathering friends, figuring costs and working out the details, our plans to tie dye seemed to have become a lost cause. However, never having been one to give up easily, I made one final attempt to salvage our plans; laying out the shirts one-by-one across the patio, hoping, with any shred of luck, we’d somehow be able to complete more than step one: dampen shirts.
I was in the process of laying out shirt three, stuck in the idea that we had to follow our plans to a T, when an friend swooped in and saved the day. Following her advice, we gathered up our supplies and headed to their basement. We stopped in a cement corridor, no more than yard and half wide. It was not much to look at, featuring most notably, a large dog pin, an oversized sink and a plethora of storage space.
However, we set to work on our shirts with no complaints, content to even get to try our hand at tie-dyeing. Of course, with only one of us having done so in what was probably the last then years, we ran into some troubles. We laughed at each other’s inability to twist shirts into circles, our anxiety towards applying the dye and confusion of even the simplest instructions. Not knowing what technique would turn out best, we tried to imagine what each other’s would look like, complimenting one another on creativity. In the end, not one of us had used the same technique to create their shirt as the rest.
It didn’t end up mattering that we had to relocate, be more careful or even that we had to take turns dyeing over the sink. The fact is, we had fun. Maybe having to share and taking turns in that yard and a half wide space even forced us to take notice of what one another were doing. I can’t say I’m happy that it, literally, rained on our plans or that we had to change them. I can say, however, that I’m glad we had sense enough to change them when the unexpected happened.