Message: I found this company called The Mountain that makes dyed shirts with prints on them and the style of dye is exactly what I'm looking to make. I'm not sure if it's LWI or another type of tie dye so I wanted to check if you knew how I could dye shirts that would look like theirs? Their website is themountain.com and here's a link to a site that sells their shirts. This shirt is a perfect example of the black/grey dye style I want to do [see detail at right].

There are two kinds of dyeing on that shirt. The foreground picture of wolves was apparently printed using dyes, rather than the usual screen printing inks, which means it will feel soft even on the picture. I gather that you're asking about the background, however.

Low water immersion dyeing, or LWI, is a good way to achieve the effect seen on the background, which is composed of different shades of black/gray. See "How to Do Low Water Immersion Dyeing". Note that it makes a big difference whether you use a premixed color, or a single-color dye: see my post, "Black Dyes: mixtures and single-color blacks". The amount of variegation is affected by how much you move the fabric in the LWI dyebath. The black shirt on that page that I dyed with Dylon Permanent 12 Black, which is a single-color black, shows some white because I did not disturb that fabric at all after adding the dye; poking at the fabric and turning it over in the dyebath will result in having no white regions remain at all. Without stirring, a premixed black, such as a Procion MX black, will show different shades of brown and navy in LWI dyeing, but enough stirring will help even the several colors that are mixed together look more black.

You can also dye a similar background using direct dye application, which is like tie-dyeing without the ties. You can follow the tie-dyeing recipe, except for the tying, and presoak the shirt in soda ash before painting or squirting on the dye.

There is no way that any form of tie-dye could be used to dye that background. Tie-dyeing requires the use of ties or rubber bands to constrict the fabric, preventing dye from reaching some part of the fabric. If you look at that background, there is no sign that any ties of any sort were used.

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