Obviously, We Needed Tie Dye Shirts for Our Camp Wedding

When we started to plan our wedding, all we knew was that we wanted to transport our guests to our favorite place for the weekend: summer camp. We wanted everyone to get to experience the things we love so much about camp, from swimming in the lake and playing games to campfires, friendship bracelets, camp songs, crafts and just having a whole weekend to be together in one place.

Obviously that meant that we needed a tie dye shirt for each guest!!

I have been making tie dye for years, so there was really no question that tie dye was going to be part of our wedding weekend, but I really wanted the shirts to feel like more than just a wedding favor. I wanted everyone to have something they could wear around camp all weekend, and I loved the idea of seeing a whole group of our favorite people in tie dye together.

So, I made a whole bunch of tie dye shirts.

I knew I didn't want everyone to have the exact same shirt, so I made lots of different colors, which meant that there were piles and piles of white shirts taking over our house for quite a while. There were pinks, purples, blues, greens, yellows, oranges and absolutely no red, and I really loved getting to play around with the colors and make each one a little different.

The process took a LOT of time, but I honestly loved it. There is something so fun about having a giant pile of blank shirts in front of you and getting to decide what each one is going to become. I spent days folding shirts, dyeing shirts, rinsing shirts, washing shirts, screen printing and then laying everything out to dry, and our house basically became a tie dye factory.

And then there was the sorting.

So. Much. Sorting.

Once everything was washed and dried, I had to get all of the shirts organized and ready to bring to camp, which meant making sure we had enough for everyone and trying to keep track of all of the different sizes and colors. It was a little bit of a project, but seeing all of the finished shirts together made it SO worth it.

And then we got to bring them to camp.

We had the shirts ready for our guests when they arrived for the weekend, and I was so excited to see everyone start putting them on. By the time we had a big group photo of everyone together, I was basically looking at exactly what I had pictured when I first had the idea.

Everyone was wearing tie dye, but nobody was wearing the exact same thing.

There were all of these different colors and patterns and people we love, all together at camp for our wedding weekend, and it really did feel like we had created our own little camp for the weekend.

That is one of my favorite things about tie dye in the first place. You can start with the same blank shirt and the same handful of colors, but every shirt ends up being its own thing, and then when you put them all together, they still look like they belong together.

And getting to see our friends and family running around camp in shirts that I had made was SO FUN.

It made the whole weekend feel even more like us.

We wore them while we hung out around camp, went swimming, played games, spent time by the lake and just got to enjoy being together, and I loved that everyone had this little piece of the weekend to take home with them at the end.

There were so many details that went into making our camp wedding feel like our camp wedding, but the tie dye was definitely one of the biggest ones for me. It was a little bit of a labor of love, but it was also just really fun to get to make something for all of these people who mean so much to us.

And honestly, if I had to plan our wedding all over again, I would still make all of the tie dye shirts.

Obviously. 🌈⛺️