Name: Cheryl
Message: Hi. I have read alot of your info and am now worried that I didn't research thoroughly before I dyed. I just used the squirt bottle to dye shirts for my GS troop and their Moms. I used RIT liquid dye. I did actually boil the water and put about 1/4 - 1/2 inch of liquid dye into a squirt bottle with about 2 cups of boiling water and approx 1 T of salt. However, I didn't realize that the shirts were 50/50/ cotton/polyester. I am worried that the dye will wash out. I told the parents to wash in cold water and line dry. We did our shirts on Monday - today is Thursday. I am hoping you can SPEEDILY tell me how to make sure the dye doesn't wash out? I even called RIT before we dyed the shirts! They gave me the instructions!!! Note: the shirts are bright yellow and we squirt bottled a speckled star with royal blue. HELP FAST!!! from what I read I am wondering if I need to purchase the Retadyne (sp) to wash all the shirts and call my parents quickly. The girls (25 - 6 year olds) will be crushed if it washes out!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks for you help.

It's way too late to make sure. The only time you could have made sure that the dye would not wash out was before you did the dyeing. I am sorry.

Did Rit actually tell you to apply cooled Rit dye solution to the shirts? Or did they tell you to apply it to the shirts while it was still hot? Squirt bottles do not tolerate boiling water very well, and must be very difficult to handle while the contents are of the scalding hot temperature you needed, but all-purpose dye applied in cool water is good only for items that do not require laundering.

It doesn't matter if you boil all-purpose dye in the water, if you then let the water cool to room temperature before applying. The fabric itself must be heated with the dye in order to attach to it; boiling all-purpose dye solution should work only if applied while it is still scaldingly hot. All-purpose dye is not safe to use around children when it is hot enough to work at its best. The heat is what enables the all-purpose dye to weakly attach to the fiber (though it is not, even at best, a very permanent dye). If you use all-purpose dye on cotton, but do not use hot water during the dyeing process itself, you should expect most of the dye to wash out. We can hope that it will not all wash out, so that the children are left with some pastel color on their shirts. However, further washing would not be a good idea. If, after one initial washing, enough dye is left on the shirts to be worth saving, then you could try obtaining some Retayne from your local quilting supply store, or from any of the dye supply companies listed on my website's Sources for Supplies page. It would make the most sense for you to ask them to bring the shirts back to you, so that you could treat them all in one washing machine load.

However, of course the all-purpose dye would never stick to the polyester half of the fiber even if you used it correctly. Polyester cannot be dyed except with special 'disperse' type dyes created solely for synthetic fibers. This means that the intensity of the color will be half of what it would have been if you had used 100% cotton and still made the same error, of using poor-quality dye without the heat that it needs. If you use high quality, intense dye (not all-purpose dye) on 50% cotton/50% polyester, you will obtain pastel shades. In this case, however, you may be lucky to get very pale shades.

I hope that a little of the dye does remain in your troop's shirts after one washing, so that you can try to save it. I strongly recommend that you never use all-purpose dye on cotton, however (and certainly never on polyester); you can do so much better if you use a fiber-reactive dye on 100% cotton. Fiber reactive dye, unlike all-purpose dye, actually does work at room temperature (70 degrees F and above), with no need at all for handling hot water. It is also a lot less expensive for dyeing more than one or two shirts at a time. Good brands of fiber reactive dye include Procion MX, Drimarene K, and Cibacron F. I recommend that you order a "tie dye kit" from PRO Chemical & Dye or Scarlet Zebra or .

A way to salvage these particular shirts, if you find that not enough dye remains upon them after they are washed, might be to iron on designs that you have the children draw with a special type of fabric crayon that works on polyester. DO NOT USE ORDINARY WAX CRAYONS FOR THIS PURPOSE! Crayola makes both wax crayons for use on paper, and special disperse dye crayons for use in making iron-ons for polyester. This is possible only because your shirts do contain at least 50% polyester. Most fabric stores carry fabric crayons, as do many stores such as Target. The children will create their designs on paper, and then you or another adult will iron them on to the shirts. The same picture can be ironed on several times, making a great repeating-motif effect. See "Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes".