When it comes to tie-dye, there are degrees of knowing and not knowing.

Holly and Matty Hilts know the best kind of dye (fiber reactive procion). They know the best kind of fabric (100% cotton). They know the colors that mix well and the colors that do not (red and blue might appear more muddy than purple or patriotic).

When they bundle up that freshly drenched T-shirt, they have a design in mind (perhaps that familiar swirl, always unfamiliar for however the colors settle).

“I know certain things,” Holly says, “but you never know what it’s gonna look like.”

That’s the thing about tie-dye.

“You have to give up that control,” Matty says.

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Which is how the husband and wife have lived their lives — surrendering to the mystery, just going with the flow.

Which might explain how they ended up here at this colorful, Victorian enclave along Colorado Avenue on Colorado Springs’ west side. They call it Captain’s Cove, consisting of a multi-unit vacation rental home, a cottage and a studio in the back.

Welcome to Captain Drips, the new tie-dye studio in town.

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Before they opened these doors, the abandoned space represented a blank slate — a blank shirt.

“We saw the space and we were like, ‘This is perfect,'” Holly says. “Like, I’m not gonna be upset to make a mess in here.”

Go ahead, they tell the tie-dye curious walking off the street, the couple walking in for date night, the kids at the birthday party — make a mess. Just please mind the merchandise: finely tie-dyed hoodies, collared shirts, dresses and overalls hanging between lava lamps and plants. And please mind the concert posters hanging on the wall. Those are souvenirs of the Hiltses, who very much like to boogie.

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Yes, the Grateful Dead is represented beyond the name of the studio. The spirit of the late Jerry Garcia, aka Captain Trips, is felt inside Captain Drips.

It’s a spirit of creativity. Of collaboration. And yes, of openness — joy in the process before the uncertain result.

The process of snow-dying is especially uncertain.

“When it snows, you can anticipate we will be using that snow to make Rocky Mountain snow dyes,” Holly says.

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Rocky Mountain snow-dyed shirts are the result of powder-dyed snowpack melting upon them. It’s a fitting practice for the Hiltses, who intimately know snow.

About 15 years ago, they moved to Colorado Springs from their native countryside outside Buffalo, N.Y.

“Where we’d have snow and ice storms that shut things down for three or four hours,” Holly says. “Now we’re playing with snow here.”

They are playing between day jobs. Holly is a counselor at Rampart High School. Matty works for a medical device company — a corporate setting in stark contrast to his persona.

“He walks in like this every day,” Holly says, nodding to her long-haired, bearded husband dressed in tie-dye. “He definitely does not fit into that world.”

He prefers a colorful world of art. He had expressed this years ago, along his and Holly’s lifetime of tie-dying. They tie-dyed in childhood and later hosted tie-dye parties at home and around campfires, inviting friends and any and all.

“It was Matty who said one day, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we could actually just do this for real?’” Holly recalls. “And I was like, ‘You have an idea, I’m gonna go with it.’”

An unfortunate circumstance sprung the first iteration of Captain Drips.

One morning the Hiltses woke up to find a pipe had burst inside their house, sending a flood. This led to an overhaul of the laundry room, in which they fashioned a space for their hobby.

“We had this terrible thing happen,” Holly says, “and we turned it upside down and made a tie-dye studio.”

But the modified laundry room did not quite achieve their needs. They needed to make an unmitigated mess. They needed more space — more space for more people.

This was the point of those tie-dye parties: bringing more people together. Now people come to Captain Drips, hearing some introductory jokes from the instructing couple — “Is everyone ready to dye?” — followed by bits of chemistry and history.

“The Grateful Dead, obviously, was the turning point in the popular culture,” Holly says, “but it goes much further than that.”

Tie-dye is traced thousands of years back to cultures across the globe.

Bandhani is an early form out of India, a style that came to be associated with love and goodwill; bandhani is still seen at traditional weddings. Sometime in the eighth century, the Japanese bundled rice in fabric to create Shibori, which came to be revered by the wealthy before it was banned. Amarra is seen as another early style. It appeared about 1,500 years ago in Peru and evidently made its way to Indigenous people of the modern-day southwest U.S.

Tie-dye had American moments before the hippie heyday. During the Great Depression, the government encouraged tie-dye as a fun, cheap form of fashion.

Then came the generation of hitchhikers to Woodstock. Matty Hilts’ father was among them.

“When I was a kid, my mom would every once in a while make some tie-dye,” Matty says. “My sister and I would just beg her all the time. ‘Can we do that tie-dye?’”

This helped inform his first vocational thought.

“I always wanted to be an art teacher,” Matty says. “But I was kinda discouraged from doing that, because teachers don’t make any money unfortunately.”

Now he sometimes feels like that teacher. Outside the hours of his corporate job, he’ll be that helping hand at a kid’s birthday party.

At Captain Drips there are gatherings with fellow adults as well — events that are equally fulfilling.

“We have people who are now friends from them coming in to do tie-dye,” Holly says. “They leave and we’re hugging. We’re strangers and we’re hugging.”