Message: I'd like to make a shirt for a friend of mine who is a Steelers fan. Their uniform colors are gold and black, and their helmet colors are yellow, red and blue.

I'd like to use low water immersion, but I don't know what color combination to choose. Also, I'm going to silk screen a picture of my friend (in black) on the front of the shirt. I'm going to silk screen his name across the top of the back, kind of like a football jersey.

I was thinking about using different shades of gold and yellow and painting the collar and sleeve ends black so the black slightly bleeds into the golden colors of the shirt. But I can also work with the red, blue and yellow helmet colors, but I'm afraid low water immersion will cause the colors to get muddy.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for this wonderful website. Thank you for sharing your techniques as well as your art.

Black silkscreen ink will work perfectly well on top of any fiber reactive dye, as long as the dye around the image is a light color for contrast, such as your golden yellow. You can do the screening before or after dyeing (of course you must wash and dry the shirt after dyeing, before silk screening). 

However, it's true that red, blue, and yellow, in low water immersion, will make muddy colors that don't suit your friend's team's colors. Even black plus yellow will make green where they overlap (black dye is often a very dark navy blue). Your idea of doing low water immersion for just the yellows, and then direct dye application for the black at the edges is a good one, laying the shirt out flat and dripping or painting each color of dye exactly where you want it, making allowances for some spreading of the dye. I think you may want to let the yellows dry before you apply the black, to reduce the amount the black blends with yellow to make dull greens. You can add sodium alginate to thicken the dye if you need to further restrain how much it spreads. 

For low water immersion that involves applying both golden yellow and black at the same time, if the yellow and black are going to overlap even a little, I'd rather avoid using premixed colors. Premixed colors can do very interesting and beautiful things, in low water immersion dyeing, as the different colors in the mixtures spread out and blend in unexpected ways; it's a process I highly recommend, but not when the aim is to stick at all close to a sports team's colors. This is not so important if you let the yellows react fully and dry before you add the black, though. Wet-on-dry doesn't spread and mix as much as wet-on-wet.

All Procion MX blacks are mixtures of multiple colors. There is only one reactive black dye I know of that is a single black, not a mixture of many brighter colors. There are only two ways for you to buy a small quantity of this particular black dye. One is in the form of Dylon Permanent Black 12. My local Joann's fabric store carries this dye. You can also buy it by mail-order from Create For Less. The other source is much more economical in the long run, but less so if you are going to do this only once, on a single shirt. PRO Chemical & Dye, which happens to be an excellent place for hand-dyers to buy there dyes, sells the identical black dye in liquid form, in their series of PRO Liquid Reactive Dyes, which are a type of Remazol dye. (A different source of reactive Remazol dyes, the Jacquard Vinyl Sulphon dyes sold by Dharma Trading Company and other suppliers, does not contain this particular black, but only a premixed black containing multiple colors. They are otherwise a good dye source but not useful for this particular black unmixed single-hue dye. Also, there is a Dylon Cold Black which is another mixture, not suitable for his project.)

Golden yellow dyes are easy to come by. Any sort of black dye you buy, you can get yellows and golden yellows in the same line. You can also use both Procion and Remazol dyes in a single project.

I'd like to know what you decide to do with this project and how it works out. Good luck with it.

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