What to Know About Dyeing Fabrics

I've been making quilts for about 27 years. And I think I've tried just about everything there is out there in the quilting world, but never have I had so much fun as when I started dyeing my own fabrics. The idea of being able to put your own color and your own mark down your own fabric and then use that fabric in a quilt of your own making, to me it's just so exciting. So, I learned to dye and everybody that I know that dyes dyes in a different way. We dye in ways that are going to give us the fabrics that we like to use, or we like to play with. So when I first started dyeing, I thought it was going to be just for myself. And then people started really liking the fabric and I started producing it to sell. And so, I'm always playing with different ways of coming up with unique and different fabrics. When I dye a fabric, I want it to have interest in it, not just color, even though color is really important. I like there to be lots of texture on the surface. When we look at this top dyed fabric here, it's probably the simplest type of dive that I do. And it is simply crumpling the fabric into a tray and then pouring on a single color of dye and you get this wonderful modeling throughout the surface. I don't really like a solid looking dye. I could get that from a solid fabric. So, I always want there to be a good deal of texture on the surface of my fabrics. This next fabric here was done in another type of scrunching method, only it's done with a linear roll of the fabric. And then you get these wonderful lines, as well as all the modeling in there. This was done the exact same way, only I use two different colors of dye. So, I get the wonderful mixing together of the blues and the violets. This is one of my favorite dye designs and it's a resist technique. And this resist technique has been around forever. I learned it from a man who does Indigo dyeing. And this is simply a folded technique where we fold into accordion folds in one direction and then again in another direction to yield this wonderful square. And believe it or not, this was done with one color of dye. When we custom mix our own dyes and we mixed two different dry dyes together, when we mix them together with water, they tend to separate out color-wise and we get this wonderful play of color. This one is also a folding technique. And you can see that there's a triangle, a very faint triangle in there. And it's an accordion fold also, but instead of being folded into a square like the previous one, it's folded into a triangle. But these are probably my absolute favorites. And they are scrunched into a tight ball and then injected with dye using a eyedropper. And it's a wonderful way to get very multicolored fabrics. This was done in the same way but with a much smaller range of color. And this final one is a rainbow. And rainbow is are very fun to do also. You don't have to use as many colors as I used here, but it's really nice to be able to get a piece of fabric that I can get lots of different colors from. And as you can see, when I fold this over, we have identical colorations on each side. So, it's a folded piece. Now, I don't always work with fat quarters but it's one of the easiest ways to start. So, these particular pieces are 18 inches wide by 30 inches long because my fabric that I use is 60 inches wide. The most important decision when you start doing your own dyeing is the fabric that you choose to dye on. This is a prepared for dyeing fabric. That means that it doesn't have anything on the surface of it that could impede the dye becoming permanent. You can dye on just about anything you want to but if it's not prepared for dyeing, you should probably prewash it. And your best bet for pre washing is a product called Synthrapol. And we'll be using Synthrapol today. What it does is it's a scouring agent and it will take everything off the surface and hold it in the water so that it can't go back down on the fabric. And that's what we want. We want a fabric that's as clean as it can possibly be so that the chemicals can react with that fabric can be permanent. So in addition to really good fabric, you're gonna need quite a bit of different products. This can be a little bit expensive when you first start, but you can buy dyes and very small packaging or you can get them in much larger packaging. The dyes that most of us use for cotton is called Procion MX. And I've tried about six different brands of Procion and they all tend to work exactly the same, just different companies have different proprietary blends for color. So it comes in a powdered form, and the powdered form contains some really small fine particles that are carcinogenic. So it's very, very important that you wear a mask, and the mask needs to be a grade that will hold out the size of particles that are in the dye. So, make sure that you're looking for... This is a 95. So, you need a 95 or higher. You'll also need some gloves. You can get really good gloves. You can get not so good gloves. You can see by my nice blue finger here that these gloves broke through the other day and I get to wear a blue finger for a while. But the gloves are nice to keep the dye off of you number one, but it also keeps the dye even if it gets on you from setting in because your hands kind of get wet inside and then it doesn't stay for around so long. You will need some chemicals that help the dye also. So, the first chemical is called urea. And again, not every dyer uses urea. Some of us like it, some of us don't really care about it. It comes in these strange little balls. And basically what it does is it helps to keep the fabric wetter longer. And I mix it directly into my dye. The other thing that is very important is soda ash. And so this is soda ash here. And soda ash gets mixed with water and we call it our chemical water. What the soda ash does is help the chemicals in the dye adhere permanently to the fabric. So it's a very important product, too. While we can mix the urea right in with the dye, we don't mix the soda ash right in with the dye until we're just about to use it because it shortens the life of the dye. Once a dye is mixed, so once I've mixed the dry dye in with water, it can last outside of the refrigerator for anywhere from three to four weeks, or you can refrigerate it for six to eight weeks. But as soon as I put the soda ash in it or the soda ash chemical water in it, it only has about a two to four hour life. Now, I've used it when it's about five hours old and what we get as a lighter dye instead of the deep, intense color that the dye may have been. So, it kinda kills the dye. So we want to put it in as we use up the dye. Now in my studio, I keep dyeing mixed up 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And we go through our containers sometimes as quickly as in two days, but sometimes a container might be sitting around for two weeks and we've never found that it doesn't have the same life. So you don't have to be really, really, really careful, but you want to pay attention to how long your dyes have been mixed. It's not really a lot of fun to finish a day of dyeing and then go to rents and find out that your dyes had already dyed and now all your colors are now light. You will also need some containers that you use just for dyeing. You never want to use your containers again for anything else. Even though the dyes are most carcinogenic when they're in their powdered form, they're still chemicals that can be dangerous. And so, we don't want to ingest anything that's been in a container that has said dye in it before. So, I just keep a lot of plastic containers around that I can use and reuse and reuse again.