Name: Syreeta

Message: Hello!

I have gotten hold of a few tins of Dylon Cold Water Dye (luckily for free) and have a couple of questions. With the colours I have (I'll list them in a moment), can I make other colours I need?

The colours I have are as follows: A21 Mexican Red, A22 Sahara Sun, A23 Bahama Blue and A29 Koala Brown. The colours I'd like to make (or at least get close to are: A2 Sea Green (or a nice pastel green), A5 Dawn Pink (again pastel if possible), A6 Moon Blue, A17 Cafe Au Lait (or the closest thing to a milk chocolate colour) and finally the closest thing to a white chocolate colour (I guess a really pale cream?).

I'm dyeing some short pile rayon fur that's used for mini bears and other soft toys to make some mini "plushies". They are meant to seem like they are made out of candy which is why I mention pastel and chocolate colours. I have been scouring the net for a mixing chart for the Dylon Cold Water Dyes, but found nothing. Do you know of a good way to get what I'm after without having to buy the colours outright?

Dylon does not share this sort of information with anyone. They don't recommend that you mix their dyes at all, because they view color mixing as their job, not yours. That doesn't mean that you won't be able to do it, though. Some of your desired colors will be impossible given those starting colors, but most should be easy enough.

I think you'll want to do some trial and error. Mix each of your dyes with water, then use an eye dropper to mix equal parts of one with another. (Use a different dropper for each color, or rinse it out between colors.) It might be easiest if you can buy a plastic palette with circular depressions in it at an art supply store, or use a white ice cube tray. (Better not to reuse it for making ice for your drinks; though the dye's not very toxic, it's best to act as though it is.) Dip a small piece of your rayon fabric into soda ash (or Dylon Cold Dye Fix), then drip on a bit of each sample dye color. You can heat it for a few seconds in the microwave to speed dye setting, then rinse it out in hot water and check its color. Keep in mind that the fabric will be lighter in color after it dries.

The Dylon Cold Dye is mostly Procion MX type dye. Unfortunately, the colors as mixed are not ideal for mixing into other colors. They are premixed, not the purest possible dye colors. Sometimes people complain about the difficulties in mixing the colors they want using Dylon dyes. the dyes will not last forever after being dissolved in water, but they will last two or three weeks if you protect them from any exposure to soda ash or other sources of a high or low pH. Refrigeration makes them last even longer. Once the dye goes bad, it won't bond to the fiber; then it will just wash out afterwards.

If you did not already get Dylon Cold Dye Fix with your dyes, don't bother to buy it, because soda ash or washing soda is the exact same thing, but far, far cheaper.

Dylon Sea Green [see the color chart to the left] looks like their Bahama Blue with a little yellow added. (If there's too much red contained in the Sahara Sun, it will make your greens more olivey and less sea green.) For Dawn Pink, try a very small amount of Mexican Red. Moon Blue was a greyish pale blue; your only blue, Bahama Blue, is too greenish to match it, I think, but you could try adding some Koala Brown and diluting it to get the paleness needed. Cafe Au Lait is much more mauvey than Koala brown, try adding some red and some blue to it. All of the white chocolate I've seen in real life is pretty close to pure white, so that's a difficult color to imagine; try using only a tiny tiny amount of your best approximation to Cafe Au Lait.

Mixing colors is something you get better at with practice. To save yourself some time, you can use a nifty website, Olli Niemitalo's Dye Mixer Applet. Use it to approximate one of the colors you have, then add a color similar to one of your other colors to see what happens. This is especially useful for visualizing difficult colors such as browns. The charts on this page: "How can I mix Procion MX dyes to get specific colors?" will also give you some ideas for color mixing, though they start with different dye colors, so they won't be directly applicable.

To make a color pastel, just use less dye or more water. A very pale pastel may require only one-tenth as much dye powder as an intense dye color.

I'd prefer the chance to try and make the colours the way I want them and don't really have much money to buy much else (even dye). Plus certain colours are hard to find (I can't find Cafe Au Lait even on eBay without having to pay near three times as much for the little tin). I hope you can point me to a guide or an easy way to mixing (aside from trial and error which may result in using up all the dye :P) as I hate having to ask you all these questions. Finally, is making pastel colours really as easy as just using a little dye? The pieces of fabric I'm dyeing are 9" x 9". What's an easy way of measuring the recommended amount I need for fabric pieces that would be so light to weigh?

Yes, pastels really are just small amounts of other colors.

The best way to reproducibly measure such small amounts of dye is to make a stock solution by dissolving a known quantity in water, then measure out some of the water. This will be easiest if you use the metric system. Glass pipettes or the five-milliliter droppers used for children's medicine are most accurate. Kitchen measuring spoons are less accurate but sometimes work well enough. One US teaspoon contains five milliliters, and one US tablespoon contains 15 ml, but I've read that a British tablespoon contains 17.7 ml. 

One tin of Dylon Cold Water Dye contains 5 grams of dye, enough to color 170 to 220 grams of cotton fabric to the color of the lid of the tin; rayon often dyes a bit better than cotton, producing brighter colors, so you might need a little less. (Viscose rayon will dye wonderfully with Dylon Cold Dyes and other fiber reactive dyes; acetate rayon will not.) Weigh your 9"x9" pieces of fabric on a kitchen scale or a postal scale, whatever you can access that will weigh such small pieces, or if your best scale won't go down that low, try weighing ten pieces of fabric and dividing by ten, etc.

The Procion MX dyes sold by Fibrecrafts in the UK are the same sort of dye as the Dylon Cold Water Dye, but if you buy the pure unmixed colors, they are far more satisfactory for color mixing. Unfortunately they are more expensive than at my favorite sources for larger jars of Procion MX dye in the US.

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