Message: How do you avoid "red spot?" I use Dharma Dyes and get "red spot" with certain dyes. I have found that increasing temperature helps to dissolve the red better but of course I have to over-dye the item. As I dye in Mass quantities for my company, it would be wonderful to cure this problem. Thank you for your time.

Short answer: either avoid the use of all mixtures containing the offending dye, or find a more dependable dye supplier.

So far, in my experience, 'red spot' has always been caused by the use of bad batches of one specific dye, everywhere listed under the name of fuchsia, more specifically known as known as red MX-8B or reactive red 11. Unfortunately, this particular red dye is way overused as a mixing color, though the better-behaved dye red MX-5B (reactive red 2, or 'light red' [at Dharma], 'mixing red' [at PRO Chemical & Dye, a.k.a. ProChem], and '034 magenta' [among the Jacquard dyes]) can nearly always serve as an excellent substitute, being extremely close in color. Dharma uses fuchsia in many different mixed colors, such as midnight blue, and when a bad batch of fuchsia has been used in the mix, you will find red dots on your fabric, or orange dots in your mixed golds, or red dots in your mixed purples. This is often not a great problem in direct application methods such as tie-dye, but absolutely ruins some projects requiring a more predictable deposition of color.

All of the various dye retailers, such as Dharma and ProChem, buy Procion MX type dyes that have been manufactured at various factories, mostly in Asia. Procion is out of patent now and is manufactured by many sources. It seems that any company that purchases dye can get stuck with a bad batch now and then, at least if they do not test the quality of a given batch before accepting delivery of it; for some reason, so far, it appears that this particular fuchsia dye is the only one that has this tendency to go bad in this way. When a company inadvertently sells a poor quality product, they should replace it, free of charge, with one of acceptable quality. Check the return policy of your dye supplier before you buy fuchsia dye from them, and avoid companies that refuse after thirty days to replace defective batches of dye that they have sold. Sometimes fuchsia is okay at the time of purchase but goes bad within a couple of months, even when stored carefully, though properly stored MX dyes should stay good for a minimum of one year.

Good batches of fuchsia dissolve with a little difficulty, but nothing serious. Any remaining lumps should be easily removable by filtering the mixed dye solution through either a coffee filter (held in a funnel that won't be reused for food) or a scrap of sheer nylon stocking. However, there are two problems with the answer of filtering the dye solutions. First, it really is a pain to have to do it, as it is just more mess and more time required in mixing dyes. Second, it does not always work. Sometimes enough clumpy dye particles get through, from a particularly bad batch of fuchsia, that the problem persists in spite of repeated filterings. It is far better to either find a more reliable source of fuchsia, and any mixed colors containing fuchsia, from which to purchase your dyes, or to mix your own colors while substituting red MX-5B for the problem red MX-8B.

There are twenty or so different colors among the Procion MX type dyes; most dye supply companies sell only about eleven of these, and then fill in the gaps with mixtures, some prepared by the manufacturers, and thus uniform from one dye seller to another, while others are proprietary mixtures, prepared in-house. The color mixtures that have MX codes are generally the same whether you buy them at Dharma or Prochem or RG&S (Jacquard); see the MX dye comparison chart at <http://www.pburch.net//dyeing/FAQ/pureMXcolors.html>. The in-house mixtures cannot be precisely compared to the in-house mixtures sold by any other supplier. If you make a habit of using any of these, you will have to experiment until you find a substitute for the mixture you like. To mix your own, you will save a lot of time, in learning what colors mix to form which other colors, by consulting Olli Niemitalo's amazing online MX Dye Mixer. You can generally do quite well by substituting Jacquard's '034 magenta' or ProChem's '305 mixing red' (red MX-5B) for fuchsia (red MX-8B).


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