Can I dye a polyester fiber without a carrier? How?

Name: Ahmad

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Dye polyester and poly/cotton blends

Country or region: Lebanon

Message: Can I dye a polyester fiber without a carrier? How?

You can skip the dye carrier chemical, and boil the polyester with the disperse dye for half an hour or longer. The color will not be as intense as you will get with the use of the dye carrier, but is fine for medium or pale shades. Some disperse dyes require a higher temperature in the dyeing process than lower energy disperse dyes do; also, some polyesters take up the dye better than others without the dye carrier. For example, without a carrier, blue "iDye Poly" dye works better on Dacron 64 polyester than on Dacron 54 polyester. What this means is that you should do a small-scale test with your particular polyester fiber and your disperse dye to see what it does without a carrier.

Apparently, in industry, polyester dyeing is often carried out at 130°C, a temperature which allows polyester to be dyed without a carrier chemical. This temperature cannot be reached in a dyebath without a pressurizing device, such as a pressure cooker. However, a small pressure cooker, such as is used for food preparation, will probably be too small, requiring that the fabric be folded; any folds or wrinkles are apt to become permanent after the heat treatment.

Disperse dye may also be applied to polyester without a dyebath, via a heat transfer process. No carrier chemical is needed. You can make disperse dye transfers on paper, using either disperse dye crayons or a paint that you mix using disperse dyes, and then use either a heat transfer press or a hot clothing iron to transfer the design to your polyester, without steam. Obviously, this method is unsuitable for dyeing a solid level color, but it presents many possibilities for prints.

For more information on hand-dyeing polyester, see the following two pages:

"Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes"

"Iron-on Fabric Crayons for Synthetic Fibers"

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Posted: Friday - October 29, 2010 at 08:11 AM

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Can I dye a polyester fiber without a carrier? How?

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