Name: Robyn
Message: Oh please help me. I am a Craft Coordinator for my church and have a serious problem. I am scheduled to tye dye with our youth group this Wednesday. Two weeks ago during Vacation Bible School I had a tye dye project go flop and due to the expense of buying the materials I saved the soda ash solution to use for the youth Wed. night. I went to soak my shirts in this solution tonight and someone in the church had mistakenly dumped it. Is there a homemade remedy for soda ash. I read on line something about using lye. Our project is a little different from basic tye-dye. We are suppose to make our designs using tape. THerefore, you soak in soda ash first, let dry, then spray the dye over the shirt and taped area. When dry the kids were supposed to remove the tape to see their creation. I am at a complete loss as to what to do. Any advice?

Any pool supply store will sell sodium carbonate for use in swimming pools, and so do many hardware stores. This is the highest quality soda ash, and it is what I always use. Be sure to check the label for "sodium carbonate" - NOT bicarbonate!!

If that doesn't work out for you, you can substitute washing soda from the grocery store; Washing soda is also sodium carbonate, but may have unwanted whiteners and brighteners added, so is not as good as the hardware store variety, and you must use approximately three times as much, due to the extra water molecules included in this form. It's pretty good as last-minute emergency substitutes go, though.

Lye will work, but it is a lot more dangerous to mix, and you have to be a lot more careful about using exactly the right amount to get the right pH. I do NOT recommend that a non-chemist experiment with this, especially since soda ash is easier to find locally than lye is.

See my page on What is soda ash, and what's it for?.