I opened a couple of my jars of dye to take a look at it and my colors don't look anything like the color chart samples they show you on their website.

Name: Louise

—ADVERTISEMENTS—

q?_encoding=UTF8&Format=_SL160_&ASIN=B0009PY4WQ&MarketPlace=US&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&tag=dyeblog-20&ServiceVersion=20070822

"Learn How to Tie Dye" complete 3-volume DVD set

Country or region: USA

Message: Hello Paula,
I recently purchased Dharma fiber reactive dye from dharmatrading.com. I've never used Procion dye before, only Rit, that being the reason I switched to fiber reactive. I'm a little concerned. I opened a couple of my jars of dye to take a look at it and my colors don't look anything like the color chart samples they show you on their website. The rust brown looks more of a red than a brown, and the grayish brown I ordered looks like a basic brown. I'm wondering if maybe they put the wrong colored dye in the jars. In your experience, is this normal? Will they look more like the colors I wanted after I add chemicals and the like, or did they give me the wrong dye? It's not a matter of hue or shade of the color, its more like the colors are the wrong type of that particular color.

Don't panic! There is nothing wrong. Good dye powder is always so much darker than the color it will produce that it often appears nearly black, and it can appear to be quite a different hue, as well, depending on the individual dye color.

The only reason that Rit dye may appear to be anything like its final color is that it is highly dilute. Each packet of Rit dye contains only a tiny quantity of dye, mixed together with a very large quantity of sodium chloride (table salt) and laundry detergent. One packet apparently contains only about 2 grams of direct dye plus about 4 grams of leveling acid dye, in addition to about 26 grams of relatively inert ingredients. Since the vast majority of the ingredients of the Rit package are inert white powders, the tiny amount of dye in the mixture is lightened to the point that it can resemble the final color produced.

In contrast, the Procion MX fiber reactive dye you've purchased is highly concentrated. It contains no table salt (the sodium chloride that makes up so much of the Rit mixture) and almost no detergent. It contains only small amounts of other ingredients for essential purposes, including stabilizing the dye, helping to prevent the dye from dusting into the air, and standardizing the colorizing power of the dye by weight so that one dye lot is the same strength as another. (Dye powders are standardized by weight, not by volume, so that one gram of dye is always the same strength; however, one package may be more or less dense than another, so measuring by the teaspoon is less accurate, though often good enough.)

There is no reason to expect any dye to be the same color in powdered form that it will be on the fabric. For example, a green or navy blue dye will normally appear almost black in the jar; a yellow dye will appear to be orange. Yellow dye that will produce a light yellow on your fabric looks orange even after you mix it with water. The greater amount of surface area of a powder scatters the light, making the material appear darker. There can be chemical changes in dye as well, when it is dissolved and allowed to bond the a textile fiber, which means that some colors look quite different, and not merely darker, when in dry powdered form. Fortunately, we don't care what color the dye powder may appear to be in the jar, as long as the dyed textile material turns out to be the right color, after the dye has bonded.

Your results with the Procion MX dye you ordered from Dharma Trading Company will be much better than what you could obtain with all-purpose dye. Fiber reactive dye, such as Procion MX dye, will stay bright for years instead of weeks, and, once you've washed out the excess unattached dye from the dyeing process, it absolutely will not run in the laundry. Although Rit-dyed clothing must be hand-washed separately from other garments, to avoid ruining items of different colors when the dye bleeds in the laundry, it is safe (after the first few washings) to dump Procion-dyed cottons into the same washing machine load as white clothing, and even wash them in hot water, without any color transfer occurring. If you dye all of your clothes with Procion dye, you can give up sorting your laundry by color.

Instead of using boiling water to set the dye (Rit works best in simmering water at a temperature of 190°F), you simply add soda ash or washing soda, to chemically set the dye, so there is no need to heat the dye with the fabric to get it to perform as well as it can. Washing soda is a major constituent of laundry detergent powder, so it's something you've probably used many times, though the pure form is what's needed here.

Procion MX dye is far more versatile than Rit dye in how it can be applied. Like Rit dye, it can be used in a large volume of water (adding salt, which is much cheaper purchased separately) to produce a single solid color; it can also be mixed with small amounts of water and, optionally, some thickener, to make dye paints for painting on fabric. It's mixed with small amounts of water and applied to fabric that has been presoaked in soda ash water for tie-dyeing. Because there are so many ways to use Procion dye, it's important to find a recipe for the method you wish to use first, and follow the recipe closely, until you are familiar with the way the dye works. There are good recipes on my website; there are also many recipes on the Dharma Trading Company web site. These are excellent resources for learning to use your dye.

(Please help support this web site. Thank you.)

Posted: Monday - May 28, 2012 at 10:01 AM

Follow this blog on twitter here.
Tweet

getBlogName(); > getCategoryName("<$EntryCategoryFolder$>"); >

I opened a couple of my jars of dye to take a look at it and my colors don't look anything like the color chart samples they show you on their website.

> >