Name: Charity

Message: I am making a bunch of tie dye shirts, socks, and baby oneses. I bought a tie dye kit from walmart called "rainbow rock". I read your page and you recommended these kits and pretty much said everything should go fine. I did everything as directed and in fact did not wash them until later the next morning. I then started one by one rinsing each item. I rinsed until they were pretty much running clear water and then I set them aside. I figured that the color were set by now so it didnt matter if one shirt touched another. Well I guess I was wrong and shortly realized one shirts color was bleeding into the other. VERY BAD LOOK! I tried to revive them the best I could by rinsing them all again in cold water. A few are ruined and really dont know how to fix them so I guess I will throw them out? Like a yellow and white shirt that got green and purple etc stains on them. The only thing I can think of as why the dye is not setting in that well is because the weather has been cold and I didnt have the recommended warm/hot heat around them while they sat over night. What do you think I should do now? One last question, would it help if I put all the shirts in the dryer to help set the dye even further? or would that be worse and bleed?

What you have there is a problem with backstaining. If you allowed the dye to react overnight at 70°F, your problem should not be permanent. You can remove the unwanted dye by washing, and soaking if necessary, in very hot water, 140°F or higher.

The only worry is that you mentioned that your reaction temperatures were low. This can be a real problem. If your reaction temperature was so low that the dye-fiber reactions had not completed by the time the dye transfer occurred, then it's possible that the transferred dye may have reacted permanently with the fiber. However, since you washed out all of the soda ash, this may not have happened. All you can do now is try the proper washout procedure, which requires washing out the transferred dye in HOT water. Use a little laundry detergent when you do this.

The problem is not necessarily caused by your dye not being set on the fabric. If you used the kit properly, then the dye will be permanent. You just have to get out all of the excess dye. When you use fiber reactive dye, only about half of the dye can react with the fabric. The rest reacts with the water and can associate loosely with the fabric until washed out at high temperatures.

When you rinsed your dyed items in cold water, you removed a lot of the unattached excess dye, but not all of it. When you then allowed the wet items to rest together, some of the remaining unattached dye transferred. This is inevitable. Before allowing wet garments to contact one another, you want to complete the washing out of the excess dye first, which requires that you wash the items in hot water. It will probably take two or three washings to get out all of the unattached excess dye, unless you also soak in hot water.

You can do this washing-out step with all of the garments together in one washing machine load. You don't have to do it by hand. Just make sure your water is hot enough. If your water heater has been turned down to 120°F to reduce the risk of someone being burned by scalding water from the tap, you have several options. One is to turn the water heater back up to 140°F temporarily. Another is to heat water on your stovetop and soak your garments in it, or add hot water to your washing machine. An efficient way to use hot water is to use a cheap insulated cooler to soak your garments in hot water. Note that water that is hotter than 140°F will work even better. Professional dyers often wash out with water that is near boiling.

Using the dryer will do nothing to help set the dye. Moist heat is required to set dye. Dry heat from a dryer is sometimes used to set the acrylic binder in fabric paint, but not for dye. Use the dryer whenever it's convenient for you to do so; it won't affect the dye.

Good luck, I hope it's just an ordinary backstaining problem that can be washed out in hot water, and not the result of cold dye reaction meaning the dye reactions were not complete.

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