community of dyers

thank you for directing me to these other sites so that i can visually mess around with color options. i could not sleep the other night because i was trying to visualize on how i could tie a shirt to make a rainbow. hence, the indigo and violet. my daughter loves rainbows so i thought why not?

it is so exciting to try out new ideas and see where it may lead.

paula, you are one amazing woman. you are a wealth of knowledge. it is extremely impressive because not only can you create tie dyes you know the mechanics behind the many facets of how dying works. your knowledge has been a great help so once again... thank you.

I do that, too, lying awake at night trying to visualize colors. I can spend more time thinking about colors than about anything else. I just reread Michael Wilcox's book, "Blue and Yellow Don't Make Green," about color-mixing watercolors, oils, and other pigmented materials. The pigments are not exactly the same as our dyes - I need to write about how to think about color mixing dyes - but it's still a very useful introduction to how to think about color mixing. Now I want to read everything else Wilcox has written. Our public library has one other book by him, so I have to go pick that up soon.

Here's a snapshot of my younger son wearing a full-rainbow coverall, many years ago....

I think the red in that coverall in the picture might be a mix of red MX-5B and orange MX-2G, but you can also make a nice true red by mixing a little yellow MX-8G with red MX-8B. The edges come out different depending on which exact dye combo you use, but the colors are still very good.

I'm glad to be able to share this information with others who care about it, too.

I too am in the situation of whanting to create a color and I am not sure how to get it. I want to make brown. I know you can mix blue/orange or red/green or purple/yellow. BUT to find the correct mixture, well the possibilities are endless!
What I did the other day to figure out purples was to take a junky t shirt and mix different ratios and record the ratios, it was a great way to find out what I like and do not like. AND some colors were too similar that there really wasnt a visual difference.

I plan to do that for greens and browns too.
I understand the concept of staying with pure colors, but I think it might be easier for me to just buy a brown that I like and be done with it! What do you guys think?
I want to make an outfit for my daughter with brown and turq.
Thanks for the feedback.

There is nothing wrong with buying a jar of pre-mixed dye colors if it's a convenience for you. It is important to learn how to mix your own colors, since a certain amount of color mixing on the fabric is inevitable, and since this opens up an infinite number of colors for you to play with, but you don't always have to mix every color from scratch.

You should be aware that the pre-mixed colors will have 'halos' of different, perhaps quite unexpected, colors around the edges. This is especially so when the dye mixtures contain fuchsia (red MX-8B), which, as the most reactive of all Procion MX type dyes, tends to strike the first bit of fabric it touches, unllike the other dye colors which generally tend to creep along the fabric a little bit before becoming permanently set. It is often easy to tell whether a particular tie-dye was made with Procion MX dyes, rather than another class of good fiber reactive dyes, just by looking for the hallmark of purples that have turquoise edges and more intense fuchsia in the middle. It's a nice look, though, and is not something to be avoided unless it's not what you're looking for.

Go ahead and buy any pre-mixed color that strikes your fancy, though. I recommend that when you buy pre-mixed Procion MX dye colors from an American supplier, you stick to PRO Chemical & Dye, or any supplier of Jacquard Procion MX dyes. If you buy premixed dyes from a supplier that is less careful about their dye mixtures, you may end up with the infamous red dot problem.

It is a lot of fun to experiment with a pre-mixed dye color in low water immersion dyeing. In many cases, you would never guess exactly what dyes are in the mixture, until you see it spread out. Adding soda ash after the dye has had time to crawl along on the fabric causes very lovely and subtle color gradients to form. LWI dyeing is easier than tie-dyeing; I really think you should try it sometime, if you like the pictures of fabric that has been dyed this way at all. Clothing dyed in the LWI method tends to be more subtle and beautiful, and more suitable for formal occasions, than tie-dyed clothing.

When you decide to try mixing your own browns, I recommend that you try starting with orange, and gradually adding a smaller amount of navy blue such as your blue MX-2G cobalt. Try this on Olli's Dye Mixer Applet to quickly see what I mean. It's interesting to see that you get much more olive browns if you use turquoise MX-G in place of the navy, and yet another range of browns if you use blue MX-G (cerulean) in place of the navy. (Note that Olli's Dye Mixer Applet includes a number of pre-mixed dye colors in his list!) The next time you order dyes, you may want to order a few more of the single-color unmixed dyes, especially orange MX-2R, because a good basic orange orange is very handy for mixing browns and true reds. Of course you can also mix a perfectly nice bright orange by adding a smaller amount of fuchsia (red MX-8B) to any yellow dye. Look at my listing of "Which Procion MX colors are pure, and which mixtures?" to see which colors are the pure unmixed single-hue dyes, which are more indispensible in mixing than any of the pre-mixed colors.

As always thank you for all the info, your knowledge on this topic knows no bounds!!!
I noticed when I mixed my fuchsia and yellow (both pure) I got a halo effect. Why is that? I thought that happens only with non-pure dyes. Did I do something wrong? And it did come up immediately, I could see the fuchsia react -- it was kinda neat. Except if it were a real peice, not a tester, I would not be happy with the effect. How do youcounter act something like that?
Thank you, keri

Fuchsia, red MX-8B, is a very interesting dye. Sometimes I really love the special effects you get from the way it separates out from the other colors on the fabric. The results can be very pretty.

When you don't want your red to behave differently from the other colors, you are better off buying a different red, instead. I recommend red MX-5B, which Jacquard (RG&S) sells as "magenta", PRO Chemical & Dye as "mixing red", and Dharma Trading Company as "light red". I like to have both red MX-5B and red MX-8B on hand at all times.

The other colors do not all behave just alike. Avoiding fuchsia will not prevent the problem of halos altogether. The most memorable haloing combos all seem to involve fuchsia, but there are others.

To get a bright red with relatively little haloing, I like to mix red MX-5B with orange MX-2R. Jacquard sells a nice red mixture that contains just these two dyes, under the name of "Fire Engine Red", if I recall correctly. This is not the same thing as Dharma's Fire Engine Red, by the way; Dharma carries this same dye under the name of Scarlet (assuming that there have been no reformulations). Although this is a mixture of dye colors, it's what is called a 'manufacturer's mixture', already mixed when Dharma and Jacquard buy it, and it is tagged with the MX code of red MX-BRA.

For a lovely violet that does not separate out at all, there's a pure unmixed dye, violet MX-2R, which is mislabeled as violet MX-G by most dye suppliers. Both ProChem & Dharma sells it as "Grape" and some Jacquard suppliers sell it as "Violet". ProChem also sells a much pinker violet, called Boysenberry, which, as far as I know, no other US suppliers sell.

You can get very nice purples by mixing red MX-5B with the various blues, as well. Red MX-5B is really an essential dye to have on hand for mixing colors for tie-dyeing, if fuchsia does not meet all your needs for red.

Do you all stay way from the company that is "a bit careless" about their fuchsia? Or just stay away from their mixes?
I want to place a dye order and was thinking of one stop shopping, but I would rather spend a bit more on shipping and get better results.
thanks, keri

I've never heard a real complaint about any dye besides fuchsia (red MX-8B), in addition to a large number of color mixes that contain it. The other unmixed single-hue MX dyes seem to be okay regardless of where you get them. If you're buying dyes from a company whose dye has generated complaints in the past, substitute red MX-5B instead of red MX-8B, and beware of color mixtures. Assume that any premixed color will contain fuchsia as one of its ingredients.

If you are only tie-dyeing, the red dots really are not a big problem. Filtering out clumps of dye is a pain and may shift the color produced by the mixture slightly, but red dots from unfiltered dyes or dyes that clump again after filtering (which does happen sometimes!) don't look so bad in tie-dyes. You're bound to want to immersion-dye something a solid color eventually, though, and that's when you really must be careful.