Name: Chris L.

Message: Hi there,  I've been experimenting with batik on cotton t-shirts, and I always seem to have trouble that the dye fades during the boiling out of wax.  I've tried rinsing in cold water, then washing in cold with synthrapol first, then boiling out, as well as boiling out first, then washing in synthrapol like you would without wax.  But my shirts never seem as vibrant as just tie-dyed shirts.  Any suggestions?  I love your website, by the way!  Thanks a lot.

What kind of dye are you using? What brand name is it, and where are you buying it? How are you setting the dye?

Batik should be just as brilliant and vibrant in color as the brightest tie-dyes, if you use the right dye and do everything right in applying it. Applying the right dye is easy, but sometimes there is some detail that someone does not get right. If we can figure out that that is, you'll be able to get colors just as bright as you want.

I've been using the Procion dye from Dharma Trading.  I've followed the instructions they send with their tie dye kit, which involves water, urea, salt and the dye.  After washing and drying new shirts, I wax my design, then soak in soda ash for 15-20 minutes, before dying.  Sometimes I dye by squirting on with bottles, then rubbing it in a bit to blend the colours, other times I paint it on with a paint brush.  Not too much in the vat dye method, but maybe that would be a better choice?  I think the recipe for the dye is different then.

That's a good choice of dye, assuming that your dyes are fresh (no more than a year old) and have never been stored in a very hot place (such as a few hours in a hot car). You should not need to change to vat-dyeing instead of direct dye application. There are several things you might be doing wrong:

1. You might not be using enough dye. I recommend four teaspoons of dye per cup of dye solution. Your dye on the shirt should look way too dark before you wash it out.

2. You might have hard water. If so, always use water softener, sodium hexametaphosphate, often sold by dye suppliers as Metaphos. Hard water dulls dye colors and also makes it hard to wash out excess unattached dye afterwards. Add it to your dye solutions, your soda ash, and your washing and rinsing cycles in the washing machine.

3. You might not be giving the reaction between the dye and the fabric (with the soda ash!) enough warmth and/or time. The minimum temperature is 70°F overnight (21°C). I prefer to find a warmer place, at least 80°F, such as the top of the refrigerator, the top of the water heater, in a bucket in a sinkful of hot water, or covered with a plastic sheet and an electric blanket.

4. Your colors may be being dulled by backstaining. Before washing out, allow excess time for all of the dye to react, so there is no unreacted dye to stain other parts of the design permanently, and do your final dye washout with HOT (140°F) water, to get out all excess unattached dye.

5. Shirts with any stain-resistant or permanent-press finish, or with any synthetic fiber content other than rayon, will not dye brightly. Use only 100% cotton with no surface finishes.

6. You might be exposing your dyes to soda ash too soon. Dye will go bad within an hour or so after it is first exposed to soda ash. This includes dye that has had the paint brush put directly into it after touching the soda-soaked shirt. The paint brush gets soda ash from the shirt into the dye you are painting with, even if you dried your soda-soaked shirt before starting to paint on it. Use a small temporary container of dye for directly painting your pre-soaked shirts, and toss it out and get more dye from your main dye mixture after an hour of use.

7. This may sound ridiculous, but I've known cases in which there was no soda ash in the soda ash soak! A different white powder, most likely urea, had been inadvertently used to mix up what everyone thought was the soda ash soak. Check your labels carefully. Unknowingly omitting soda ash will really dull your colors down.

8. It sounds like you're doing a single round of waxing and dyeing, but if you're doing the traditional multiple rounds of waxing and dyeing, color choice is a real key in the brightness you get. Any time that a given section of fabric gets all three primary colors on it (turquoise or blue, magenta or red, and yellow), it will end up being duller in color. This can be a great thing when the darker, duller colors are what you want, but it's something to be keenly aware of.

9. Color choice in general makes a big difference in brightness. For the very brightest mixed colors, use yellow MX-G for your yellow, turquoise MX-G for your blue, and either red MX-5B or red MX-8B for your red. (Red MX-5B is easier to dissolve and will not leave the dots of red on your work that red MX-8B and mixtures containing it often will.)
 
Also, when I mix a couple of colours together (ie turquoise and yellow to make green), do I need to wait a while to let them combine?  Sometimes they don't seem to blend well, or when I rinse out the yellow seems to rinse out more than the turquoise.  I always mix them together after they are in the liquid form, not the powder form.   I had a similar experience mixing green (which was made up of the turquoise/yellow) and red to get brown.  In the rinsing process, more green rinsed out leaving a more reddish brown.

When you mix different colors, they do not react together in any way. If one color rinses out more than another, it is because it did not react well on the fabric. When turquoise rinses out more than other colors, it usually means your room temperature is too low, because turquoise needs extra warmth compared to the other Procion MX dye colors. If yellow is rinsing out too much and leaving you with less yellow on your piece, you either need to use more yellow, or you need to buy a fresh jar. Any of the problems listed above may affect one dye color more than another.

Properly affixed Procion MX dye will survive any washing you care to give it, including boiling. I like to rinse once in cool water, and then wash a couple of times in hot (140°F) water. The only Procion MX dye that is removed when you boil out the wax is dye that was never permanently bonded to the fabric in the first place. There is always a lot of excess unattached dye to wash out, so if you have not completed the washout, you will see some dye in your wax boiling water, but this should not affect the brightness of your fabric if you do everything right to get a good amount of dye fixation to the fabric during the warm dye/fiber reaction time (with soda ash).

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