Steve Anderson
How I Began Tie Dyeing~
I was in the Army in 1983, when I used an OD Green T-Shirt to wipe up some bleach that another soldier had spilled in the laundry room. It was an emergency measure, to prevent his bleach from ruining several of my uniforms, but when I rinsed it, it looked really cool. The neck area of the shirt was still green though, so when I wore it under my BDU’s (Battle Dress Uniform or Fatigues), you could hardly tell.
Well, one day, my unit was going from range to range, qualifying with our weapons, and we had to wait for another unit to finish. Our First Sergeant didn’t like seeing us all scattered about, ‘smoking and joking’, so he decided that we needed to make productive use of our time, by doing some calisthenics. He told us to get into PT (Physical Training) formation, remove our BDU Shirts, and start with some jumping jacks. I was the only one wearing anything out of the ordinary, so I was sticking out like a sore thumb.
He walked around to come up behind me, and said “If I ever see you wearing that hippie crap again, on duty or off, I’ll give you an Article 15 (basically a very expensive citation, which costs a soldier 1 month of pay, and 15 days of extra duty).” I knew I was on to something, if it worked him up that much.
A year later, when I had gotten out of the Army, my parents took me to a Unitarian Universalist Conference in Virginia, and Tie Dyeing was one of the afternoon activities for the kids. I was 21 years old, but just for fun, I bought a six pack of white T-Shirts, and dyed them. We used RIT Dye, and it took only an hour or so, but as I was washing them out, five different people offered to buy one of them, while they were still rolling around in the dryer. Once again, I knew I was on to something.
That was 1984, the same year that a friend gave me a copy of The Grateful Dead’s American Beauty on one side of a tape, and Workingman’s Dead on the other (On cassette. Remember cassettes?).
In 1987, I was still attending the conference (the last week of July every year) and was spending most of my afternoons making tie dyes in the courtyard with the little kids, when the Youth Director called me into her office. She said “You know that the Tie Dye Program is very important to the kids, right?” I thought that she was about to tell me to back off, and quit hogging the dye, but instead, she said “How would you like to come for free next year, on staff, and run the program as a workshop?” (She had unknowingly just established my career) I said “SURE!” (it was an expensive conference, so the idea of coming for free, and doing something that I loved, as a staff member, was very appealing).
Before any of that happened though, about the same time that I started experimenting with the professional grade dyes (Procion), she called me on the phone, sometime around April or May of 88, and said “I still want you to do the workshop, but can you also dye about 80 shirts, for the entire Youth Staff, and print ‘Youth Staff 88’ on them?” (My first ever wholesale order).
I filled the order, but I also dyed another 50 shirts, for myself, with what she paid me, and before I went to the conference at the end of July, I went on my first Grateful Dead Summer Tour, from June 15 in Minneapolis, to July 3 in Oxford Speedway, Maine, selling dyes along the way. It was a miserable failure, as they were all the same design, and I only sold about 10 shirts on the whole tour, and still had 40 of the 50 that I’d started out with, when it was over.
I learned then, that diversity of design was crucial, as the ones that I took with me were all black and blue spirals, that I intended to sell a million of, marketing them as ‘Ice Cold Tie Dyes’.
The rest is Photographic History, since I decided, long ago, to ask everyone who buys a shirt, to pose, holding it up with a smile. I explain that I do my inventory, advertising, and accounting with those photographs, and when MySpace and Facebook came along, I started posting them online, in my Happy Customer’s Albums.
The rest is photographic history~
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