Avoid this Mistake when Dyeing Fabric!

Shibori, tie-dye or batik? Avoid this mistake so you can get beautiful vibrant colors.

Dyeing fabric can be one of the most amazing, creative, and satisfying experiences ever, but there's a lot of knowledge that you need before you get started, and there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Today, I'm just going to kind of pare it down to the very basics so you can jump right into dyeing, so you don't have to read everything on the internet like I did.

I'm going to go ahead and just describe the process first. You have to mix your dyes. It comes as a powder. You mix it into water, then you have dye.

Something that you need to be aware of is that the dye has to be mixed at the proper temperature. 80 to 90° Fahrenheit is the optimal temperature for some colors but they all react differently and have their own optimal temperatures. There is a step that you don't want to skip here, and that is making a paste with your powder. Before you just go dumping your powder into the water for your vat, it's better if you do an in-between step, and take a small cup with a tiny bit of water and put your powder in there. Mix it up and that way you can really smooth out any of those lumps that are in the powder and you can make sure it's getting fully opened up.  That way, when it goes into your water, it's actually getting mixed throughout the water.

You also have to prepare the fiber. You have to wash it with a special dyer's detergent. Then you have to soak it in soda ash. Soda ash is required. It will not take if you don't have soda ash. So you have to soak your fabric in water that has soda ash in it prior to dyeing it.

To recap: you mix your dyes, you mix your soda ash, you've washed your fabric, you've soaked soak your fabric in the soda ash. Now you're getting close to being ready to dye.

Now you can do your folding techniques for your shabori, your stitching techniques, whatever it is that you want to do. So fold, put your rubber bands, do your strings, whatever it is that you want to do to make your design.

Procion dyes are an immersion type of dye. That means all you do is submerge your fabric into a vat or tub of mixed dye. You wait 30 minutes - 1 hour and then when you pull it out, you wait some more to let the dye cure. Wait about 18 to 24 hours after pulling it from the vat before you finally rinse it out with water.  Keep it in a plastic bag during this cure time.

So, avoid the mistake that I made and do not mix your soda ash into your dye unless you're about to use it all right then. It will ruin the dye after just a few hours. I did this and all the colors came out really pale and just completely skewed. Pretty much every color turned blue, just like a light grayish shade of blue, except a couple colors turned like a weird light lilac pink. Learn from my mistake, and learn lots lots more from the people at dharmatrading.com. That is where you can order your Procion dyes and other supplies too.