How do you tie dye a shirt with food coloring?

What different substances do I put in the bucket to tie dye my shirt for halloween?? and do I use the rubberbands or what do I use to actually get the tie dye effect?? help! thanks

Food coloring will not work on cotton! It will just wash out. Food coloring works well on wool, and it works moderately well on silk or nylon, because it belongs to the class of dyes known as acid dye. Unfortunately, acid dyes don't work at all on cotton or rayon, nor on polyester or acrylic.

To use food coloring to dye a shirt that is made of wool, silk, or nylon, you have to boil the shirt in a mixture of several bottles of food coloring with water and vinegar.

To dye a cotton shirt, you have to find a dye that works on cotton: best choice is to go to a crafts store and buy a fiber reactive dye intended for cotton, such as Procion MX dye, Tulip One Step Fashion Dye, or Dylon Permanent dye; if you can't find any of those, use all-purpose dye such as Rit dye, which is not as good but is far better for dyeing clothing than food coloring.

To dye polyester, either mail-order polyester dye (called disperse dye), or buy disperse dye crayons from the fabric store (they're called fabric crayons) and make your own iron-ons. You cannot dye polyester with food coloring or Rit dye. No dye that works on cotton or wool will work on polyester.

See:
• How to tie dye with Kool-aid and other forms of food coloring
and
• Using Food Coloring as a Textile Dye for Protein Fibers
for more information on using food coloring as a dye for clothing.

(Please help support this web site. Thank you.)


[This answer was first posted, by me, on Yahoo answers, on October 30, 2008.]