Name: Manoj
Message: How to make a nice jet black reactive MX Dye ? What should I start using: which blue, orange and red?

It's a lot of trouble to mix your own black. It's not practical to mix black if you are starting with only light, bright colors, such as reactive blue 140 (turquoise MX-G) and reactive yellow 86 (yellow MX-8G). You would have to use such a huge concentration of dye that you would not be able to get it all onto the fabric in just one round of dyeing.

To mix black, you need to start with dull, dark mixing primaries. Start with a dark navy. The easiest navy to find is Blue MX-2G, reactive blue 109 which ProChem calls mixing blue and Jacquard and Dharma call cobalt blue. There are other single-hue navies in the MX line, but they can be harder to find. Reactive blue 168 (blue MX-4GD) and reactive blue 9 (navy MX-3R) are also good navies to start with. You can start with a pre-mixed navy blue if that's what you have on hand; it will contain mostly a single-hue navy, anyway, plus one or two other dyes. Use a large amount of it. You need to end up with two to four times as much dye, per cup, as you would normally use for other colors than black.

Once you have your navy, add the dullest color you have that's opposite on the color wheel. The opposite of blue is orange. If you have any reactive brown 23 (brown MX-GRN), which ProChem calls burnt orange and Jacquard calls rust orange, use that. If you don't, you'll have to use a bright orange such as reactive orange 4 (orange MX-2R), which ProChem calls strong orange, Jacquard calls brilliant orange, and Dharma calls deep orange. Or just add any orange or golden sort of yellow you have on hand, until you get the color right. If the color is too greenish, add some red. If it's too purple, add some yellow. Just keep the color wheel in mind, and add whatever the 'opposite' (complementary) color is. It takes a lot of trial and error to mix your own perfectly balanced black. That's why most of us buy our blacks pre-mixed. It can be done, though, if you have some dull, dark colors on hand.

You cannot tell for sure by looking at it exactly what color your mixture of dyes is. If you paint it on a piece of test fabric, it may look like a true black, but then one color might wash out a bit more than another, so what you end up with is not quite black, but more of a dark navy, or dark brown, or dark purple, or dark green. You need to actually dye some fabric of the same fiber content that you are planning to dye, as a test, wash it out, and see how it looks. It's like making sausage: you can't taste-test the raw meat, so you have to cook some up in order to judge how to correct the seasoning. If you don't want to leave the fabric to react overnight as usual, pop it into a plastic bag and heat it briefly in a microwave oven until it is very hot, watching closely so you can stop the cooking before the bag bursts with the steam. (NOTE: the fabric must be wet. Dry fabric will catch on fire if you microwave it!) Let it sit for a few minutes being very hot, then, after it cools a bit, wash it out by hand in hot water, perhaps using a strainer to keep the small swatch of fabric from going down the drain of the sink, until the water runs colorless, so you can see what color it is.

The procedure is the same for mixing a black for use on silk or cotton, but the relative proportions of each dye color in the mix will be different. Each dye mixture must be standardized separately for every different fiber type.

My own favorite fiber reactive black is the remazol black, reactive black 5, because it is a single color, instead of a mixture like the Procion MX blacks, so it does not separate out into different colors. It needs a bit more warmth than Procion MX dyes, but can be used at a warm room temperature.

[Much of the text of this answer previously appeared in a posting I made on September 2, 2006, on the iTieDye forum, in response to a similar query from a different person.]

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