Hi Rebecca! I love seeing you dye on cellulose fibers. I have a suggestion for you to try: ice dying! Ice dye allows the dye to slowly strike and you get these really beautiful tendrils of color. You will also see lots of breaking (try using amethyst or shitake, my favorites for breaking). But you must ice dye IN THE MUCK!!! Use a dedicated plastic tote and add your fiber that has been presoaked in soda ash + water. Cover with ice. Sprinkle on more soda ash. Sprinkle on the dye powder (I like to use a small sieve to dust the dye on like dusting powdered sugar on a cake). Cover and let sit for 24 hours. No heat needed but no poking!!! I usually wash in synthrapol after rinsing as much dye out as I can. The colors will turn out vibrant and beautiful!
I really should try ice dyeing with fiber reactive dyes! I want to do this on tshirts as I think the results on fabric are so lovely. I've done ice dyeing on wool but not cotton.... but I really should try on cotton!
This came out so cute! It reminded me of Rainier cherries! Same thought, I need to play more with other colors; I have so much stash yarn in the blue family; there are lots of other colors too!
Hi Rebecca. I have seen you on you tube for a while . Thank you for sharing so much of your knowledge. Maybe I have a tip for you when you Are dying with relative dyes. My recept says that you have to wrapped the material in plastic and leave it for at 24 hour or more in 30 degrees for fixing the colour. Not steaming reactive dyes Sorry for my english . Hope you understand . 🙂Maibritt
There was a natural hair care fad a while back where you used baking soda to wash and vinegar to rinse. the baking soda make the hair feel very rough and the vinegar made it feel smooth and silky again. I would try adding acid during the rinse with your wool when you use the proceon dyes.
Hmmm I never thought about this before. I think that cotton yarns do soften up after they've been handled (some of the dryness is like washed jeans - they're stiff until you touch them a bit.) but I do wonder about this on the wool/cotton blends. The soda ash does damage the wool fibers a bit, so I'm not sure vinegar would fix that entirely. but some knitters will use conditioner on scratchy yarn and say that it helps.(Not that this yarn is scratchy, I'm just brainstorming)
If you want colors that can do really good splits look at brazilnut, shiitake mushroom, black cherry, imperial purple, and hydrangea. Blue violet and ultra violet are also good although I prefer the pro chem versions of those colors for both splits and as the solid color. The splits will be most noticeable when doing direct application techniques like ice dyeing or speckling. I'm not sure how well it would show up with a dip dye technique like you normally do for color breaking although I have seen them occasionally in low immersion dyeing as long as the soda ash wasn't added until the end of the process.
I bought some urea to use when I decide to dye the lyocel I bought a few months ago. I think my aversion to fiber reaction dying is the extended time at just about every step. But with the urea the saturation of the fiber should help the powder dye take. At least that’s what I found in my research.
I was wondering if you took a cotton wool blend, and started out kettle dying it in fiber reactive dye with a high enough PH and a high enough temperature that it would react pretty quickly. But then, add enough acid not only to neutralize the dye bath, but to take it all the way to a low PH so that it started acting like an acid dye. I wonder if it would exhaust and not bleed forever more like acid dyes do. It would be really interesting to compare the 50/50 skein to a 100% cotton and a 100% wool each dyed with the same amount of dye powder, but the cotton dyed at a high PH and the wool dyed at a very low PH. It would be interesting to compare not just depth of shade but also bleeding. Of course if you wanted to be super through about it, you could dye 9 skeins, not just 3, 1 of each base in each dye bath, but I don’t know if the extra comparisons would be worth using so many skeins, though you could do it with mini skeins. I know I could try it myself, I tie-dye clothing as well as acid dying wool, but I’m not nearly as precise and scientific. As an aside, yellow fiber reactive dye frequently doesn’t fully dissolve during ice dying, so the undissolved bit you were getting when you first applied it were totally normal. Also totally normal for soda ash to eat through aluminum like that.
Have you ever dyed a 50/50 blend, first with an acid dye and then the fiber reactive/alkaline dye (or vice versa), in order to dye all of the fiber in a 2 step process? Acid dye first, wash & rinse and then do the alkaline or would the soda ash destroy the acid dye? Hmmmm....
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I agree, use the right tools for the job, that goes for fiber. Try two step dying for blends. Fiber reactive and acid dye!
Hi Rebecca! I love seeing you dye on cellulose fibers. I have a suggestion for you to try: ice dying! Ice dye allows the dye to slowly strike and you get these really beautiful tendrils of color. You will also see lots of breaking (try using amethyst or shitake, my favorites for breaking). But you must ice dye IN THE MUCK!!! Use a dedicated plastic tote and add your fiber that has been presoaked in soda ash + water. Cover with ice. Sprinkle on more soda ash. Sprinkle on the dye powder (I like to use a small sieve to dust the dye on like dusting powdered sugar on a cake). Cover and let sit for 24 hours. No heat needed but no poking!!! I usually wash in synthrapol after rinsing as much dye out as I can. The colors will turn out vibrant and beautiful!
I really should try ice dyeing with fiber reactive dyes! I want to do this on tshirts as I think the results on fabric are so lovely. I've done ice dyeing on wool but not cotton.... but I really should try on cotton!
This came out so cute! It reminded me of Rainier cherries! Same thought, I need to play more with other colors; I have so much stash yarn in the blue family; there are lots of other colors too!
I watched another dyer, and she used a Mr Clean Magic Eraser on her catering pans and it worked well for removing the stains from the pan.
I've been too lazy to try this I've been living with the stains so far.
Yay, love seeing you use fibre reactive dyes. 😊 As mentioned below, soda ash and aluminium don't play nice together, even less so when hot! 😂
Loved this! And hope to see more fiber reactive dying videos (with or without your normal voice is fine!) ❤️
Thanks! I have another fiber reactive dye filmed and ready to edit. So at least 3 cotton videos this summer/early fall!
Hi Rebecca. I have seen you on you tube for a while . Thank you for sharing so much of your knowledge. Maybe I have a tip for you when you Are dying with relative dyes. My recept says that you have to wrapped the material in plastic and leave it for at 24 hour or more in 30 degrees for fixing the colour. Not steaming reactive dyes
Sorry for my english . Hope you understand . 🙂Maibritt
There was a natural hair care fad a while back where you used baking soda to wash and vinegar to rinse. the baking soda make the hair feel very rough and the vinegar made it feel smooth and silky again. I would try adding acid during the rinse with your wool when you use the proceon dyes.
Hmmm I never thought about this before. I think that cotton yarns do soften up after they've been handled (some of the dryness is like washed jeans - they're stiff until you touch them a bit.) but I do wonder about this on the wool/cotton blends. The soda ash does damage the wool fibers a bit, so I'm not sure vinegar would fix that entirely. but some knitters will use conditioner on scratchy yarn and say that it helps.(Not that this yarn is scratchy, I'm just brainstorming)
If you want colors that can do really good splits look at brazilnut, shiitake mushroom, black cherry, imperial purple, and hydrangea. Blue violet and ultra violet are also good although I prefer the pro chem versions of those colors for both splits and as the solid color. The splits will be most noticeable when doing direct application techniques like ice dyeing or speckling. I'm not sure how well it would show up with a dip dye technique like you normally do for color breaking although I have seen them occasionally in low immersion dyeing as long as the soda ash wasn't added until the end of the process.
I bought some urea to use when I decide to dye the lyocel I bought a few months ago. I think my aversion to fiber reaction dying is the extended time at just about every step. But with the urea the saturation of the fiber should help the powder dye take. At least that’s what I found in my research.
I would try a Magic Eraser pad on the stains in your pan and see if that would remove it.
I haven't bothered to try that yet. The stains are still there. lol
I'd like to see more fibre reactive dyes
L
Awesome! I have another video that is comign out in October, but I hope to do more before then.
I was wondering if you took a cotton wool blend, and started out kettle dying it in fiber reactive dye with a high enough PH and a high enough temperature that it would react pretty quickly. But then, add enough acid not only to neutralize the dye bath, but to take it all the way to a low PH so that it started acting like an acid dye.
I wonder if it would exhaust and not bleed forever more like acid dyes do. It would be really interesting to compare the 50/50 skein to a 100% cotton and a 100% wool each dyed with the same amount of dye powder, but the cotton dyed at a high PH and the wool dyed at a very low PH. It would be interesting to compare not just depth of shade but also bleeding.
Of course if you wanted to be super through about it, you could dye 9 skeins, not just 3, 1 of each base in each dye bath, but I don’t know if the extra comparisons would be worth using so many skeins, though you could do it with mini skeins.
I know I could try it myself, I tie-dye clothing as well as acid dying wool, but I’m not nearly as precise and scientific.
As an aside, yellow fiber reactive dye frequently doesn’t fully dissolve during ice dying, so the undissolved bit you were getting when you first applied it were totally normal. Also totally normal for soda ash to eat through aluminum like that.
I'm not sure if the way that at high pH fiber reactve dyes react with water if then they could function as acid dyes later or not.
cotton + fiber reactive
It's about time, right?!? I have a video with the linen/cotton blend that I hope to finish the conclusions for later today.
Have you ever dyed a 50/50 blend, first with an acid dye and then the fiber reactive/alkaline dye (or vice versa), in order to dye all of the fiber in a 2 step process? Acid dye first, wash & rinse and then do the alkaline or would the soda ash destroy the acid dye? Hmmmm....
Yes! th-cam.com/video/pOHv77H_uKU/w-d-xo.html Soda ash on wool does change the texture a little bit, but it did technically work
Try putting urea into the dye and closing it up in a plastic bag for a week next time.