Tie Dye Ron’s Tips about dyeing. (These are just my opinions, observations and suggestions. There are many ways to tie dye.) I use a fiber reactive dye that works on natural fiber so cotton, hemp, linen, jute, rayon, silk, wool, or some other natural fiber are all great. Just a little spandex is ok but I avoid poly blends like the plague. Always wash your shirts or fabric prior to ashing. If it has a No Iron finish or a Stain Resistant finish you may even want to boil it for a minute to scour the fabric. Soak in a soda ash solution for 15 minutes or more. Days will not hurt but be careful leaving pants or hoodies in ash for long periods because the ash will corrode the zippers. Soda ash is Sodium Carbonate, also known as PH+ or Washing Soda. It is used to raise the PH to about 11 and can be found with Pool Supplies as PH+, at places that sell supplies for glass making, in the laundry detergent isle next to the Borax as Washing Soda. After soaking in ash I like to spin mine in a washer. Wringing out by hand is not only too much work but it warps the fabric, spinning does not. People ask a lot whether they should dye wet or dry. Most things I dye damp and some things I dye dry. It is just up to you to decide which. There is an endless amount of ways you can go about this and is subjective like are strawberries or blueberries tastier. U tell me. Same with method used to bind. You can use gravity, rubber bands, string, sinew, fishing line, hemostats, vice grips, twist ties, zip ties or fingers. I have my own favorites which are rubber bands and artificial sinew, but like jelly everybody has a different favorite. Start easy and get progressively more complex. Almost any tie dye is one of 4 simple things or a combination of those things. A spiral, a scrunch, a pleat or a shape are the building blocks. If you want to be a good tie dyer, get those four things down pat. Make a dozen spirals a dozen scrunches, a dozen accordion folds and a dozen simple shapes. Dye each one of your spirals differently. See yourself what does what. Make one all one color, make one two colors, one color one side, other color other side. Make another just halved down the middle, do some in pie sections, experiment with a rainbow on one side and same thing on reverse, make one rainbow on one side and shift the colors a space on the reverse, try one with a solid color back or black back. Try everything; you will learn so much taking these apart. Dye every one of those scrunchies differently and when you get to pleats you can make some horizontal some vertical, some random, some very symmetrical, some can be vees or on a curve and simple shapes like circles, diamonds hearts or mushrooms to start with, you can get more complex as you go. Experiment with everything you can think of. When you wonder about something try it. If you see a tie dye you like, study it and backwards engineer it and try to emulate it. Read, study and ask questions but above all try things for yourself. Experiment in treating, folding, tying, dyeing, cureing, washout, etc. Try every variable. My two favorite things to band with are Rubber Bands and Artificial Sinew. Rubber Bands are great for most things and work best with damp fabric. They are dangerous. When you are pulling them apart to put them on a shirt, always pull with the pad of the fingers and do not let it fall between the pads into the cracks or folds of the finger. The bands get very thin when you pull hard you can easily cut yourself bad. When applying the rubber bands it is best not to disturb the shirt. Take the rubber band, pull it apart and place one side of the rubber band flush with the table and slide it to where you want it and then let go. Do not pick the shirt up and try to stuff it into the rubber band A rubber band can be put on tight enough to restrict the flow of dye but normally the use for rubber bands is to hold the fabric together and let the fold of the cloth make the pattern. Sinew is used to restrict or stop the flow of dye. If I want a sharp line or high contrast where one color stops and another one starts with no overlapping, I use sinew. It works on almost dry to bone dry fabric. If you try it with wet or damp fabric, you will end up with a mostly white garment. I wrap sinew where I want a line about 8 times snuggly and then like an archer with a bow I pull the sinew quick and very hard. It makes a weird sound, snugges or cinches to itself and requires no knots. After that first tie I only have to wrap around 4 times and pull on each additional tie. I use one continuous piece of string, no knots anywhere and when it is time to take apart all you need to do is pull the last end you tied and it will unwind. I like to use both rubber bands and sinew on some shirts. Use a good fiber reactive dye such as Procion. The more you buy the cheaper it gets. As long as you had yellow, turquoise and red you could make just about anything but I prefer to start with the 7 color ROYGBIV (Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet)rainbow and black. Occasionally I just get a taste for Amethyst or Cayman Island and get a little but I could easily just mix those. The more dye you purchase the cheaper it gets. I like pounds. Dye powder stays good for a really long time. Months, years, decades…. IDK Just store it in a dark dry cool place. Dye liquid (water plus dye) can be stored weeks or longer as long as you keep a lid on it, in a cool dark place. Some folks say they even freeze it and it is good forever but I have never. If you add soda ash to the dye rather than to the garment the shelf life of your dye is about 15 minutes. It works but you need to mix only what you will be using and use it in 5 minutes or so from mixing. If my colors are from Dharma they use the star system for mixing. Although the catalogue says 2, *4 and **8 tsp per cup I use half that ( No star 1, *2 and **4) however I let my tsp round a little rather than be flat. If something looks weak add a little to it, if it seems overkill, add some water. I use cold water to mix dye with except black. I use hot tap water for that. I have great water so I don’t need to at home, but if I travel I use distilled water or bottled spring water. If you have hard water you should also. I like to set my dye table up in the same order every time. My table is left to right reds, oranges, yellow, greens, blues and purples. Off to the side is black and grey, browns and earthy tones in the back. After dyeing for a while like this, the dye table becomes my instrument. It is to my eyes what a piano is to my ears. I have the keys which are in a scale. I am playing music you hear with your sight. Play some beautiful soothing music and burn incense while you dye or bang your head and sling dye to heavy metal. It’s all good. Urea is helpful as a wetting agent and also helps dye travel between folds. It is not necessary in a humid environment. It is used mostly to keep the shirt wet after dyeing but I use a plastic bag for that. I don’t use thickeners so I can’t really give you much info here but I can tell you that corn starch does not make a good one and that folks who use Carrageen swear by it. There are a million ways you can apply dye. You can use a bucket or bowl and do a low water emersion, u can use squirt bottles, eye droppers, basters, sponges, paintbrushes, flavor injectors or syringes and things even I have not thought of. Try it all and see what works for you. Most people use squirt bottles but I rarely use them. I do not like having to drop everything to refill them. If I were only doing a few pieces like most folks the squirt bottles would be the way to go. I like foam rubber paint brushes for lots of things. I prefer the ones with wooden handles over the ones with plastic handles because they last 20 times as long. I use a syringe most of the time and I can give you some very solid pointers on syringes. First off, don’t even waste your time with a disposable syringe. The action is sticky and you will shoot dye everywhere except the place you want it. They suck. Get a flavor injector from the cooking section or much better, get a drenching syringe with an udder needle or feeding nozzle from a farm supply house. Cut or file the end of the needle so that it is flat. I can tell you first hand if it falls off the table before you get around to doing that and it is full of blue dye and it lands point down and goes 2 inches into your foot you will have a big round dot on your foot for a year It can also cut your shirts if it is left sharp. Grease the silicon O-Ring with Vaseline. Big difference, trust me it is like when they say Sun Screen at the beach. The manufacturer says to batch them 24 hours at 70 degrees. Yes you can take them apart earlier but the optimum time is 24 hours. The 24 hour shirt may look the same to you as a shirt only batched for 8 hours but then again you may think Miracle Whip taste like Mayonnaise. There is a usually a difference. Not all colors react on the same time table and the slowest color to react is turquoise or any color that contains it. That being said the difference is slight and I make lots of 8 hour shirts. When washing out, again there are many ways to wash out but what I do is fill the washer with cold water, take apart 12 to 15 shirts dropping them into the water the second they come apart. I then close the lid and wash them on the longest most aggressive setting. I do this three times. If I want to wash hot or with detergent I wait until that third wash. After they are finished I dry them in the dryer with a dryer sheet Crank the tunes, get the head right, keep an organized space, don’t confuse dye with Dr Pepper, get relaxed and comfee and just go with the flow. Enjoy the art, enjoy the discovery and show us what you made
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 07:11:47 +0000
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