2nd Day Tie-Dye: Re-use Rinsed Out Dye

Tie-dying is a fun way to make your own cool t-shirt, but it is also kinda expensive 😯. It also seems like you waste so much dye when you hand rinse the dyed items and all that rinsed out dye goes down the drain.
Super pretty rainbows of expensive dye, right down the drain!
So this time when the family did tie-dye, I decided to try to re-use that rinsed out dye. It seemed simple enough, and if it didn't work I hadn't lost anything. Let's give it a try!

Tie-Dye instructions say to let the dyed materials rest for several hours, rinse out by hand, and then run through the wash and let dry. So we will be hand rinsing items that were dyed hours ago (mine sat overnight).
Normally you would just watch all that rainbow go down the drain. Not this time, though!
This time, squeeze the first few rinsed into your bucket/container. This will collect all that bright dye so you can reuse it.
Repeat that step until the water being squeezed out is not super brightly colored. That is mostly water, so there is not enough dye in it to save it.
Obviously you need different buckets for different colors.
A Note on Colors:
You can't collect ever color of the rainbow. If your tie dye item is mostly green, the color you get will be green. If it is red and orange, you will get a reddish orange. Purple and blue will yield a dark blue. Unless your shirt was only one color, you probably won't be able to get any of the lighter colors. Dark colors will be dominant. Also, I don't recommend trying to collect dye from a piece that has a huge variation of colors, such as purple, red, yellow, and green. You'll just get bluh messy brown.

Now I grabbed a piece of cotton material to test my tie-dye. I wanted to be sure I liked the colors I had.
Green and blue are very popular colors in my family, so I ended up with a light blue and a dark blue.

Your manner of dying is up to you.
Oh dear, that sounded AWFUL.
Take two:
Your manner of TIE-DYING is up to you. Note that traditional tie dye methods will probably not work as well with this leftover dye, but you can try it!
I took a piece of scrap material and draped it into the two buckets. Then I filled a leftover dye bottle with my rinsed dye and squirted random lines on the material. I wanted to know what the dye would do if applied with the squirt bottle.
Now we just have to wait.....
*Within minutes my lines had all blended, so if trying lines make them much farther apart than you think they should be.
I left this piece in the bucket, but I did not leave my test material in the bucket. I have included a photo of what it looked like the next day after rinsing it out like normal. Pretty good I think!

P.S: I am doing a dry tie-dye, where the material to be dyed is dry, not damp, when the dye is applied.

Rinse out the newly dyed object just like you normally would. For the pieces I let soak in the dye, I squeezed them over the bucket first and then rinsed them out.
P.S: saving this rinsed dye is pointless. So don't.
Throw in the dryer or hang on the line!

Ta-daa! A Rinsed Tie-dye piece of material!
For comparison, the t-shirt is the first tie-dye I did. The material and the pants are the second day rinsed-out tie-dye pieces. Obviously they are not as bright as the first piece, but they are still pretty and obviously colored.

To try to really show you the colors, I have several photos taken in different lighting.

I hope you find this Instructable to be a fun money saver. Enjoy tie-dying not once but twice, and wear your new fashion pieces with joy!