I recommend inviting Josh to come help with your tie-dye party... ... he's a very handy fellow to have around when mixing the dyes. :) and don't ever try to do a three day tie dye extravaganza. Yowza. But check out that alt shift rainbow design. man that's nice. <http://www.wunderland.com/WhatsOld/2005/WN.09.22.05.html> -Kristin (of the Looney variety) --On Tue, Sept 27, 2005 Josh <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I just thought I'd chime in with advice that we followed at Wunderland last weekend. First and foremost, Dharma Trading Co. is your friend! http://www.dharmatrading.com/ Dharma sells their own brand of Procion reactive dyes that come in a bazillion colors (although you really only need 3, extra colors come in very handy to avoid the tedious and time-consuming mixing). They also sell clothing blanks (various garments, white cotton, rayon or silk) for super cheap -- between $4 and $2 a t-shirt, depending on how many you buy. The Gildan shirts are very very nice, by the way. You need a fixer for the Procion dyes, usually soda ash. Conveniently, Dharma sells this in individual and bulk quantities. Urea helps the solubility of the dyes or something like that, they suggest getting that to mix with the dyes. None of our dyes had problems with clumping or anything like that and we did use urea, so that may help. Echoing the turquoise sentiment, Dharma actually instructs you to use twice the amount of dye powder for the turquoise (and some other colors as well) when mixing your dyes. Alison says that the RIT dyes are not good for tie dye. That is all I have heard about that. One thing -- I think that leaving the garments for the full 24 hours to let the dyes soak in might help make the colors more uniformly dark -- I've noticed on a few of the shirts we made that some of the colors didn't seem to stay nearly as dark as they should have. We let the dyes soak in for about 14-16 hours, but next time I think I'll strive to let them soak for 24. Make sure you have some sort of container capable of holding an entire garment for rinsing. We had a nice big plastic thingamabob for rinsing copious amounts of dye from fabric. Hope you have a tie-dye project as successful as ours! -- Josh _______________________________________________ Rabbits mailing list Rabbits@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.looneylabs.com/mailman/listinfo/rabbits