Name: Linda

Message: Hello, I dye rayon Venice lace, using mainly Tintex dyes, and small paint brushes. I dry it in my home oven at about 100°C max. My questions are, is it dangerous to cook in the oven after using it in this way, and also, would the colour stay in better if I used a fixative? 
If a fixative is a good idea, which one would be best?

What kind of Tintex dyes are you using? Here in the US, the only Tintex dye is a form of all-purpose dye. I would very much recommend against using all-purpose dye for your purposes. However, I see from your email address that you are in Australia. In Australia, Tintex sells more than one type of dye. Tintex Hot Water dye is an all-purpose dye, very ill-suited to your needs, but Tintex Low Temperature Dye is a type of fiber reactive dye, which can work very well.

Rayon, or viscose, is a form of regenerated cellulose. This means that it dyes just like cotton. Do not confuse it with acetate, which has been chemically treated so that it is entirely a synthetic material.

All-purpose dyes are extraordinarily poor at lasting during washing, unless you treat them with a cationic dye fixative. It is much easier to use a higher quality dye, including any sort of cool water fiber reactive dye, because that means that you do not need to find the cationic fixative and go to the extra step of applying it. Fiber reactive dyes form a permanent chemical bond to the cellulose. They do not wash out the way all-purpose dyes do. They are easier to use and produce longer-lasting brilliant colors.

Drying dye in the oven is not a good idea. All-purpose dye requires moist heat, not dry heat, to attach to cellulose, though even under the best circumstances it will not form as permanent a bond as fiber reactive dyes will. To dye with all-purpose dye, is best to either immerse the rayon in a boiling water dyebath for half an hour to one hour, or to wrap it up, still very wet with dye, in plastic wrap, and steam it for half an hour as though you were cooking vegetables. Note that you should not use your cooking pots for dyeing, because all-purpose dye and other dyes, and in fact all dye other than food coloring, is considered unsafe for use in tools intended for food preparation. However, I doubt that there is any problem with using your oven in the way that you have been using it, as far as safety is concerned, as long as you keep the oven clean; it is just not an effective way to fix dye.

Cool water fiber reactive dyes are superior for dyeing any cellulose-based lace. You do not need to apply heat at all. Instead, you use soda ash, which is the active ingredient in washing soda, to set the dye by raising the pH of the fabric. This is very easy to use and produces brilliant permanent colors. Use dilute dye for delicate pastels.

There are several different types of fiber reactive dye which will work well for your purposes. Two very popular types are Procion MX dye and Drimarene K dye.  Procion MX is better for using at rom temperatures as low as 21°C (70°F); Drimarene K is better if you wish to mix your colors in water in advance and store them in the refrigerator in dissolved form for up to one year. Since you are in Australia, I recommend that you mail order either of these dyes from either Batik Oetoro or Kraftkolour, both of which are located in Australia. For contact information for these and other dye sellers, see my page of "Sources for Dyeing Supplies Around the World".

You can follow the recipes in "Hand Dyeing - How to Do It: basic recipe for Procion MX dyes on cellulose or silk", or follow the instructions your dye retailer provides. You can hand-paint by adding the soda ash directly to the dye, using the dye/soda ash mixture up within an hour or so, or you can pour out just enough dye for one use and hand-paint it onto lace which has been presoaked in soda ash (first dissolved in water). (The paint brush will carry enough soda ash back to your dye paint to cause it to spoil within the day, so do not put your brush into a container with more dye than you plan to use in one day.) A third choice is to let the dye dry and then paint on liquid sodium silicate. See "What is soda ash, and what's it for in dyeing?" for more information about using soda ash or its substitutes with fiber reactive dye. Note that you should not use soda ash with Tintex or other all-purpose dye, because it does nothing useful and will not make the all-purpose dye more long-lasting, unlike fiber reactive dye.

If your lace is actually made of actetate and not rayon, then you will not be able to use any ordinary dye at all on it; neither all-purpose dye nor fiber reactive dye will work on acetate. In that case, instead, either use disperse dyes to dye it like polyester, or use a fabric paint such as Dye-Na Flow instead of dye.


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