Name: Liv Love

Message: hello...with the fall approaching...I have a favorite pair of white denim jeans I would love to turn into a dark blue jean denim...what is the best color and how many boxes and what method is best...washing machine or boiling in a pot?  Thank you SOOOO much for your anticipated response...had to ask an expert.

Do NOT buy any dye that comes in boxes! You should buy a better quality of dye, instead, if you are dyeing cotton.

The dye that comes in boxes is a bad type of dye for cotton, called all-purpose dye. All-purpose dye is a pain to apply because it requires nearly-boiling water to perform its best (this will probably shrink your clothing!), and even then it fades very quickly, and bleeds in the laundry forever. It is just plain not acceptable as dye. It is also high-priced for the amount of dye it contains. You would need a great many boxes of all-purpose dye to dye a small washing machine load to a dark color. In a small cooking pot, it would take one package of all-purpose dye to dye a pound of fabric to a pastel shade, two boxes for a medium shade, four boxes for a dark shade, and eight boxes for black; multiply this by the number of pounds your fabric weighs. The results would not last long, and they'd ruin anything else you washed the garment with.

There is a special warning for those who want to duplicate the look of blue denim by dyeing their jeans. It cannot be done! You will never be able to dye white denim to look like blue denim, no matter how good the dye you use. The reason for this is that blue denim has white threads woven in one direction, along with blue threads woven in the other direction. You cannot achieve this look by dyeing a garment; the only way to do it is by dyeing the threads before weaving them into denim. Once you dye your white denim, you will just have a solid-color blue twill.

Dyeing in a cooking pot is expensive, because the cooking pot should never be used for food preparation again, and you should avoid cheap aluminum pots, because the aluminum can alter the dye color. It is better to avoid hot-water dyes when dyeing cotton. A cool water dye such as Procion MX avoids all this hassle and performs far better, besides. If you buy Jacquard brand Procion MX dyes, I like their "Midnight Blue" for a dark indigo color.

If you do want to go ahead and turn your white pants into a solid color twill, blue or otherwise, you need to get some decent dye. You should get a cool water fiber reactive dye, such as Procion MX dye. "Dylon Washing Machine Dye" is also good, but it is available only in Europe, not in North America, and you cannot use "Dylon Permanent Dye" in the washing machine, though it's pretty good in a large plastic basin or bucket. The easiest way to dye a garment a solid color is in the washing machine.

You can buy fiber reactive dye from any of the companies listed on my "Sources for Dyeing Supplies Around the World" page. For instructions on how to dye clothing in the washing machine, see this page: "How can I dye clothing or fabric in the washing machine?" You will need dye, soda ash, and salt.

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Name: stacey

Message: Hi, I would like to build a fabric dye studio. Is there a good book that can give me info on what I will need (temperature, what type of ventilation, what type of vat's, etc..)

I have been searching all over the internet but I can not find a book that is specificly for this

Deborah Dryden's Fabric Dyeing and Painting for the Theatre has some useful chapters on this subject, although her advice is aimed at a small theater department. It's an excellent book on dyeing and fabric painting, even for those not involved with a theater in any way.

You may also wish to consult the web site of the Society for Dyers and Colourists. Many of their books are reasonably economical to purchase directly by mail-order, even if you are in the US, although they tend to be offered used at Amazon only at exorbitant prices. I have not looked at their CD-ROM, How to Manage Your Dyehouse, but it might be useful to you, and, at 15 pounds, is reasonably affordable. The Society for Dyers and Colourists sells a number of very useful technical books.

I would advise you to join the DyersList email mailing list; there's contact information and a link to the site at which members can search the archive on my mailing lists page. Occasionally such subjects as good sinks for a dye studio have been discussed on the DyersList mailing list.


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Name: hiren
Message: After go through your web found very valuable material and useful guidelines, and with high hope of getting reply from you, asking you a question: how to or where to get the detailed classification and structures of entire series of Reactive Dyes?

You need to look at the Colour Index. This is the closest thing there is to a comprehensive guide to all dyes. It is published by the Society of Dyers and Colourists. You can contact them via their web site at http://sdc.org.uk.

The cost of the Colour Index is not small. Students may be able to find a copy of this publication at a nearby university. Textile professionals should get their employers to subscribe.

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Name: Pat
Message: I have a white silk blouse that has a stain on it. I could not get it out. I put the blouse on the washing line, all day and the colour bleached out. I thought I would dye the blouse Old Rose #45. The label on the blouse says wash only in cold water. The instructions on the Tintex fabric dye box is fill washing machine up with hot water. What do I do in this case?

You can't cover up a stain by dyeing, unless you use an exceptionally dark color and several times as much dye as the recipe calls for. Dye is transparent, so the stain will inevitably show through even after dyeing. If you manage to get out most of the stain, so that it barely shows, then you can dye the blouse to make the remainder of the stain less noticeable. 

Don't use hot-water dye on a garment that can be washed only in cold water. Instead, use a cold-water dye. Cold water dyes react with cotton or silk at room temperature, using soda ash as the fixative. This is the type of dye described on the page "Hand Dyeing - How to Do It: basic recipe for Procion MX dyes on cellulose or silk". The easiest way to dye a blouse a solid color is in the washing machine; see How can I dye clothing or fabric in the washing machine?

There are different brands of cold water dyes that you can use. Dylon Washing Machine dye is available in Europe; in the US, use Procion MX dye. Order your dye from a company such as PRO Chemical & Dye. You can order it from any of the dye suppliers listed on my Sources for Dyeing Supplies Around the World page, or you can order it through Amazon: see my page of Color Chips for Ordering Jacquard Procion MX dye through Amazon.

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Name: Michelle
Message: I have no experience in fabric paints - but I am wanting to paint on my childrens' school bags made of thick canvas. I would just like to know, what would be a recommended paint to use, and where can I get it?

If you do not much care whether you can feel the paint on the fabric, as seems likely, then you do not actually have to use a good fabric paint. You can use ordinary artists' acrylic paints, available from any art or crafts supply store. 

When coloring clothing, it is unpleasant to feel the paint on the fabric. It can feel a little scratchy or stiff, which is a big problem for garments, but much less so for a book bag. When using fabric paint on garments, we like to use high quality fabric paints, which add only a very little harshness to the feel of the fabric. See this page about high quality fabric paints for more information:

Fabric Paints: a different way to color fibers

You can buy ordinary artists' acrylics at any arts supply or crafts supply store. Good quality fabric paints are more difficult to find. If your local crafts store does not carry any, you may be able to mail-order them. Unfortunately, I do not know the names of a mail-order art supply in South Africa, where you are.

Do not wash the painted canvas for at least a month after painting. If the bags must be washed after that time, be sure to turn themn inside out, and hand-wash gently. The abrasion of the laundry may remove a significant amount of the paint, given enough wear.

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Name: Cara
Message: Hi, I have read your page about dyeing polyester and realise that there seems to be many complications however I am still a little confused. I have a pink dress which seems to be 100% polyester which is the wrong colour. I want to dye it as I cant have a refund and I have nothing to lose. I see that it says to use a disperse dye but it seems that it takes extremely high temperatures to make polyester dye. Is there any way that it could be achieved in a washing machine which only reaches 90 degrees? I have no real knowledge of dying things so I'm sorry if this has already been answered! Many Thanks Cara 

No, you cannot overdye your pink polyester at washing machine temperatures, not even the 90°C achieved by some washing machines with their own heaters. You have to boil it in the disperse dye for an extended period of time, like an hour, using a carrier chemical to make up for the fact that even boiling temperatures are not quite high enough. This requires a non-aluminum dyepot large enough to allow the dress to move freely as it boils. I expect that the dyepot might cost more than the dress did.

You can tint polyester a pale brown by boiling it with coffee, but again there's that hour of boiling.

It would probably be best to sell the dress at a resale shop, or donate it to charity, and buy something else that is either the color you want or is made of a dyeable material such as 100% cotton.


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How can I mix just three Procion MX primary colors to get all the colors I want?

Dreamline dye suppliers in the Netherlands has two extremely useful charts purporting to answer this question, though they use six different colors, no more than three in each mixture. Unfortunately, they appear to be available only in Dutch. Here is a link to my attempt at translating their tables to English.

Their names, translated from Dutch, are an elaborate scheme of precious stones. The colors shown in the table are only html approximations of the swatches shown at the Dreamline web site. How accurately they are displayed will depend upon the monitor; they will not print well, so you are advised to see the color charts at Dreamline.

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Name: Bruce

Message: I couldn't find any information on your site about the following, so I figured I would ask. I'm messing around with a pair of 100% cotton jeans (that's what the tag says at least) and they aren't coming out at all like I want them too. I'm getting better at making patterns on them, but the colors are coming out extremely faded - they look like I took a dim highlighter to the jeans, if you can imagine. I've kept them outside as long as 12 hours, I'm trying again now for 24. What's more is there arent any white spots between the colors - do I need to bleach them in order to have the non-dyed area of the jeans white? would this also help with the colors coming out brighter, and non icky? Finally, I was looking to dye very specific portions of the jeans, leaving chunks of it completely untouched by dye.

What kind of dye are you using? Is it Procion MX dye, or is it Rit brand all-purpose dye, or what?

Are you using any auxiliary chemicals, such as soda ash?

I've been following the process on your website fairly closely. I start off by using a soda ash/water mixture and soaking the part of the jeans I will be dying. After about an hour I heavily squirt on the dyes (I squirt enough so that it leaks off the jeans). For the dyes I've been using squirt bottles with several teaspoons of Procion MX dye mixed with water and several teaspoons of urea. After squirting I let the jeans set for a while (I've tried up to a whole day), rinse them in cool water and send them to the washing machine on a warm cycle.

When they come out the colors look like there mixing with the color of the jeans (which I'm sure they are) leaving them very dull and ugly.It looks like I took a highlighter to the jeans. I picked out a fairly light pair. Its not stonewashed, but its certainly lighter than most. Do I need to bleach the area to get pure-er colors? I sort of assumed the whitening and brightening of the fabrics was somewhere in the tie-dye process itself (like during the soda ash phase).

Ah, there's the problem. Yes, you need to bleach the denim in order to have white regions and brighter colors.

Dye is transparent. You will get the listed colors only if you start with a pure white background. When you apply dye to blue jeans, the color you get will be the same as if you mixed in that shade of blue dye with your liquid dyes. There is nothing about the dyeing process that will whiten the original color of the fabric.

What you need to do is start with white fabric, as much as possible. Ordinary household chlorine bleach, the stuff whose main ingredient is hypochlorite, will probably be your best bet for removing color from your jeans before dyeing them. An alternative would be Rit Fast Fade for Jeans or Dylon Easy Bleach, both of which contain a chemical called dichloroisocyanurate. They can be hard to find, however. Be very careful to avoid exposing yourself heavily to chlorine bleach. Wear thick reusable rubber gloves if you might get bleach on your hands, and be sure you get fresh air instead of breathing a lot of bleach fumes. Excessive bleach exposure can me you sick. (Don't use Rit Color Remover on indigo denim.)

If you use chlorine bleach, you should "stop" the action of the bleach afterwards. The most economical way to do this is to buy a product called "Anti-Chlor" from PRO Chemical & Dye; a little goes a very long way. An easier-to-find chlorine bleach stop agent is the 3% hydrogen peroxide sold in the drug store as a disinfectant. After washing the chlorine bleach out, pour peroxide over the fabric to stop the hypochlorite from eating away at the fibers. On the other hand, if you want raggedy-looking jeans, skip this step; chlorine bleach gradually eats away at the cotton fiber, leaving worn fabric and, eventually, holes.

See "How to Tie Dye on Dark Fabric".

A warning about starting with colored jeans and bleaching them out - the polyester stitching will not bleach. 100% cotton garments are usually sewn with polyester thread. No matter what color you dye your jeans, the stitching used to hold the garment together at the seams will stay the original color, usually orange in the case of blue jeans, neither bleaching nor dyeing. If this is a problem, find a source of white jeans and use them. Their stitching will stay white when you dye the garment. It's just a matter of what looks best with whatever you are planning to do. The only way to get clothing whose thread dyes properly is to buy special PFD (Prepared For Dyeing) garments that have been sewn with cotton thread. 

Yet another warning - the special look of blue denim is the result of weaving white threads in one direction with blue threads in the other direction. The "warp" is white and the "weft" blue, or maybe it's the other way around. Dyed denim is a solid color, same for both directions of threads. It's more like a colored twill.

My other question deals with targeting specific areas. Ive attached a crude photoshoped picture of what I want the finished product to look like (circles spotted up top turning into an orange random that gets darker as it progresses footward). I was wondering how possible that design is, while leaving the upper-jeans untouched, and what I would have to do to achieve it (maybe dying/drying the jeans while there hanging from a clothesline?)

Start with blue denim jeans. In a large bucket, mix bleach with water, perhaps 1 part bleach to 9 parts water. Place the jeans so that just the bottom sections are bleached out. Watch carefully until the desired degree of whiteness is reached, keeping in mind that excessive bleach exposure will damage your fabric. Do not do this to any fabric that is not 100% cotton, as other fabrics are much more vulnerable than cotton to the destructive effects of bleach. When the jeans look as white as you can get them, wash them, douse them with Anti-Chlor or hydrogen peroxide, let soak, then wash again. Then presoak in soda ash and apply the dye directly where you want it.

Another method is to buy a Clorox bleach pen and draw lines with bleach wherever you want. The bleach in the gel is thickened, so it's easier to work with, but there's only a small amount in each pen. Wash out and stop the bleach as above.

Also, I attached a picture of a shirt that had the kind of circle designs I wanted for the knee section, and wondered if there was any special technique to getting circles like that instead of the run-of-the-mill circles.

Those look like pretty run-of-the-mill ordinary circles to me. Study the different examples in my gallery on this page. Buy some cheap 100% cotton (but not stain resistant!) t-shirts and try some different tests to help you learn how to do it the way you want it. 

I was wondering how to go about that, and if its possible to buy a 'finish' to spread on the area and keep the dyes from touching it. I know, three questions in one, but I'd appreciate guidance - thanks in advance

You can thicken your dye with alginate. See "Sodium alginate, Superclear, and other dye thickeners ".

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Name: shyam
Message: Please explain to me special reference to direct dyes:
- Action of electrolytes
- Effect of temperature
- Effect of liquor ratio
---------------------------------------------
And
General properties of sulpher dyes

I'm afraid that your request for information goes far beyond what I can write in an email. (That would take me days to consider fully in writing, at no pay!) What you need to do is to acquire books written for the textile industry about direct and sulfur dyes.

I recommend that you acquire the book Cellulosics Dyeing, edited by John Shore, published 1995 by the Society of Dyers and Colourists. You can order it from the web site of the Society of Dyers and Colourists for £9 plus shipping; see the bookstore link on their front page. You should also consider other relevant titles sold there.

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Name: Jodi
Message: I need to make some white silk whiter. How can I do that without using bleach?

There are three main options for whitening silk; you might need to try more than one, washing the silk out well between the different methods.

One is to use hydrogen peroxide to do the bleaching. Hydrogen peroxide is an oxidative bleach, like household chlorine bleach, but it is much gentler. It is also, of course, less effective, but, as you probably know already, chlorine bleach will destroy silk. Hydrogen peroxide is safe if used with care, according to a reliable recipe. There is a recipe for bleaching wool with hydrogen peroxide on PRO Chemical & Dye's website; see "Bleaching Wool using Hydrogen Peroxide".

A second option which is probably more suitable for removing dyes is to use sodium hydrosulfite, commonly available as Rit Color Remover. This is a reductive bleach which works well for removing many dyes, but I don't know how well it will remove the natural color of undyed silk.

A third option is to use an optical brightener. Use this only after completing any other whitening steps you may take. This is a product which absorbs ultraviolet light and emits it as visible light, causing the fabric to become "whiter than white". Most laundry detergents contain a moderate quantity of fluorescent brighteners, but the amount they can contain is limited by the fact that they will make black and intensely colored clothing appear lighter, as well. There are several different products you can use that fall into this category. One is Rit Whitener & Brightener; another is an optical whitener called Uvitex BNB, sold by Dharma Trading Company.

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Name: Armanjahn

Message: Hello There,

I read your informative process/instructions.
It truly is an art...

I would like to FedEx a new shirt to you, and
trust your experience to make a nice design.

I am not able to do this myself, because of
spinal problems, but I love tie dye designs,
and truly hope you can do this....whenever
you plan to tie dye in the future...

I will enclose a check, and its ok if you
take your time. I am not in a hurry......

Please let me know if this is possible...

Sorry, but I am afraid that I cannot do custom dyeing for you.

However, there is a spot on my web site where people who do custom dyeing post their names and contact info. Click on the "Find a Custom Dyer" link, under "More" on the menu on my "All About Dyes and Dyeing" web site, or go directly to the List of Custom Dyers.

It is usually best to have your custom dyer purchase his or her own clothing blanks to dye, rather than shipping the garment to them, but many custom dyers will dye a garment that you send to them. Note that PFD (prepared for dyeing) garments are more likely to produce satisfactory results than garments purchased ready-to-wear.

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Name: said
Message: bon jour
          felicitation pour votre site

          J'ai des echarpes mosline de couleures jaune bleu roug ...je voudrais les transformez en noir. J'ai essaye les resultas : 1m sur 50cm devient 70cm sur 30 plus deformation et pas facile a repasser.        merci 

What are the scarves made of? Muslin is usually made of 100% cotton, but not necessarily. Are your scarves 100% cotton?

What kind of dye are you trying to use? Is it a hot water dye? If you use a cold water dye, you will have less difficulty with shrinkage of cottons.

Good types of cold water fiber reactive dye for cotton and other plant fibers include Procion MX, Drimarene K, Cibacron F, and Remazol. Any of these will work. I like to use a black dye called Remazol Black B, also known as reactive black 5. It is a very good single-hue black dye for use on natural fibers; like most dyes, it will not work well on 50% cotton/50% polyester. Here in the US, we can buy it as "Dylon Cold Water" dye or "Dylon Permanent" dye; in Europe it is commonly available as "Dylon Washing Machine" dye (unfortunately not available here). It can also be mail-ordered from Tobasign dyes in Spain, Batik Oetoro in Australia, or PRO Chemical & Dye in the US. See "Sources for Dyeing Supplies Around the World".


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