How to Make Dye for Fabric Dyeing

So I'm gonna go ahead and mix up some dye for you. So you can see the process. I keep around towels and washcloths all the time to constantly clean up my area. And I tend to change my gloves out two or three times a day while I'm dyeing. You want gloves that are gonna fit you well, 'cause if they are sloppy and floppy, then they kind of get in your way. The first thing I'm going to do is put your urea in the bottom of my dye pot. And I'm gonna make a rather large vat of dye here because we go through it so much. And so I'm going to use three tablespoons of urea. And the urea is what helps to make the fabric wetter so that it can really absorb that dye. And then I'm going to simply put in about a cup of water. Now, some dyers really keep very strict recipes on their dye colors. I've seen a lot of people do that and really get burned out as they're trying to follow through with that recipe all the time. I keep no recipes. Even though I wholesale and retail my fabrics to people, I refuse to keep a recipe. So I'm not very exact when it comes to mixing things. If you know you want to make the same exact blue over and over and over again, you will wanna be more careful with your measuring. I simply do approximates. It's more fun that way, and I don't get burned out. So we're gonna mix up this urea until the little balls start to dissolve. Once they've started to dissolve, you can pour in your dye. Now, again, every time you're gonna open up a container of dye, you need to put on a mask. So I'll put this mask on. And I'm going to be putting in two tablespoons of dry dye powder. You can get recipes for dye all over the place for different amounts. And you'll get used to what you like to use up right away. Now, as long as that dye powder is not mixed into the water, I have to keep my mask on. Okay. So now I'm going to go ahead and add four more cups of water. And because I use these containers all the time, I pretty much know where my four cups of water is. And that's how simple the dye mixing process is. Now, I tend to pour up my dyes into small cups and work from small cups. And these are the cups that I add the soda water to or the soda chemical water to, and then use up right away. And then when I need more dye, I'll refill the small cup, add my soda water also. Which starts the dye activating. So I'm gonna go ahead and pour up. And I like to know what color my dyes are because they look very similar inside the containers. So I always keep paper towel around and I dip my paper towel in there so that I can see that dye color. And then I just hang it off the edge. And that way I know exactly what dye I'm getting. Now, I'm gonna mix up some soda water. Some chemical water with a soda ash. And I'm only gonna mix up a small amount here. Normally I would mix it up by the gallon. The soda ash, as it starts to break down in the water, will start to get really hot. So you don't wanna stick your hands down in there. Once you know the soda ash has been dissolved, you can go ahead and pour it into your dye. A lot of people think that it needs to have about an hour of resting. And so you can, you know, make it up ahead of time if you want to. I've done it both ways and I have not noticed a difference in the outcome of my fabric. So I like to use a mixture of two parts dye to one part soda ash. So what I'm doing right now is basically activating each of my dyes. Making them ready to use. Need some more here. I make this up normally by the five gallon container and just keep that in my dye studio. The reason I do that is because some fabrics are resistant to dye, even after they've been scoured or pre-washed. And if you soak them in the soda ash mixture, the chemical water, it will help to open them up even more than the urea will. And help that chemical reaction to start. So I'm going to be using six different dyes today. And one of the things that I do. And when I teach dying, I absolutely do this. Is I tend to work in analogous colorways. So lemme tell you what that means. As we look here at these dyes and we bring out a color wheel, you'll start to understand what I'm talking about. Any three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel are analogous. That just means that they're next to each other and that they are alike. And what I'm gonna be playing with today is the green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and red-violet. The reason this is important is because if I use colors that are too different from each other, they're far apart from each other on the color wheel, and they touch each other when the dye is wet, they're gonna do, what's called making mud. And I'm gonna have these gray-brown areas. Now there's nothing wrong with gray-brown areas if that's what you're looking for. But if you're looking for really bright, intense blues and yellows together, you don't want mud. You want just blues and yellows together.