Name: Mike

Message: Suggestion on using All Purpose dyes, RIT, etc.. Since this needs heat to activate it, how about performing a normal Tie Dye application with squirt bottles, then place the item in a warm 200 degree oven to set the dye to the fabric? Your technique seems like part of the item is dipped in the hot dye, which will have large sections of the item to be dyed, without the texture normally associated with tye dye.. Plus, as you noted in your instructions, the person would be working with HOT dye. This would allow cold applications and a safe warming of the item in an oven.
Just a thought.....

You are correct that all-purpose or direct dye can be heat-set after application. That is an excellent point. However, I do not recommend dry heat, because dyes require moisture to attach to the fabric (unlike fabric paint). In addition, baking takes either a long time or a high temperature in order to make sure that the center of the fabric spends enough time just below the boiling temperature of water for the all-purpose dye to attach, and there is a significant danger of scorching outside of the fabric when it gets above 212°F. 

Instead, it is better to wrap up the very wet dyed item in plastic wrap, or let it dry and wrap it in unprinted newsprint paper, and then steam it for half an hour or longer in a covered pot over boiling water, just as you might steam vegetables, taking care not to let the water boil dry. Dye Forum member Jaja has used this method successfully with direct dyes.

As you suggest, this is a better method than the method the Rit dye company recommended for spiral-dyeing with all-purpose dyes. Standing over a pot of boiling water for thirty minutes is not my idea of fun. (They say you can do it for as little as four minutes for a pastel color, but I want bright colors, not pastels!) However, novices tend to find steaming to be an intimidating step. 

More importantly, even with proper heat-setting, direct dyes and all-purpose dyes show very poor washfastness on cotton. They fade very quickly if they are laundered. Items dyed with all-purpose dye should be washed by hand only, separately from other garments, in cool water. This takes a lot of time and trouble, compared to washing Procion-dyed clothing together, without sorting, in hot water, which can be done a hundred times without much fading. Who has time for all that hand-washing? Clothing that must be hand-washed ends up being worn infrequently, in my experience.

For anyone who lives in a country in which fiber reactive dyes are readily available, such as the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, or Germany (and a few other European countries), there is no point in going to this much trouble to use an inferior dye. It makes much more sense to buy a good fiber reactive dye. Any crafts store in the US will sell a good tie-dye kit that gives far better performance with no need for any heat-setting at all, while mail-order allows the purchase of a wide range of colors of fiber reactive dye at a much lower cost than Rit dye. I recommend the use of direct dye or all-purpose dye on cotton only in those countries where it is impossible to find any other type of dye.

The washfastness problem of direct dye and all-purpose dye can be solved by applying a cationic dye fixative, such as Retayne, after dyeing. However, some dye transfer is likely to take place in tie-dyed items during the first washing, resulting in duller colors, when direct or all-purpose dyes are used. In addition, dye fixatives tend to increase the amount of fading that the dye shows on exposure to light, that is, they interfere with lightfastness, though not to as great an extent as they improve washfastness. They also slightly change the color of the dye, which is generally undesirable.

In summary, proper heat-setting plus the use of cationic dye fixatives can make direct dye and all-purpose dye acceptable for tie-dyeing, but fiber reactive dyes are easier to use and give better results, and they are less expensive, per garment, than all-purpose dyes.

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