Name: Jeff
Message: I am looking to dye about a dozen white cotton shirts to make black spots that look like a cow pattern. Besides drawing the spots on with a marker or squirt bottle of dye, is there a method to do a 'partial immersion' or some form of dip dyeing? I'm also wondering if I can reuse T-shirts by putting the spots over the old prints, would enough black Procion MX dye be likely to obscure them well?

The biggest problem is that there is no single-dye Procion MX dye (or any similar dye) that is black; the blacks that can be purchased are all mixtures of several different colors, and used in large concentrations to get them dark enough. This means that, typically, direct application of dye will result in colors separating out at the edges. You can solve this either by thickening the dye with a good amount of alginate (here's a link to Fiber-art.com's alginate), or by using a black fabric paint instead (e.g., black Neopaque at Fiber-arts.com).

You may also wish to avoid working with wet fabric. By far the most popular method of direct dye application (such as in tie-dyeing) involves pre-soaking the fabric in soda ash (dissolved in water) and then applying the dye to the damp fabric, but wet fabric encourages colors to run. You can instead line-dry the shirts after soaking them in the soda ash (so that the dry soda ash stays in the fiber), or you can mix the soda ash with the dye immediately before you apply it.

Partial immersion can work, but tends to produce non-homogeneous patterns, not quite what you seem to be aiming for here. You can pour the thickened dye or fabric paint into a shallow plastic container and dip sections, or dip a sponge into the dye and apply it to the fabric that way, or use a large sponge paintbrush.

I often dye screen-printed t-shirts, though generally with no attempt to obscure the writing. The writing will always be detectable in the right light, even if you use a very dark dye, but sufficiently dark blacks should blend in fairly well with black screen-printing on the shirts for many purposes. It all depends on how perfectly cowlike your results have to be.


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