Name: Roxie

Country: USA

Message: Is there any way to salvage a bamboo sweater that I dyed with MX dyes? It's the first time I've had any problems with Pro MX. I wound up with  a number of yellow areas on what is otherwise a teal green. I used Pro MX marine color at very dark concentration to get a nice teal, but the yellow areas are ugly. Any help or warnings as to what I'm doing wrong would be great.

The Marine Procion MX dye sold by PRO Chemical & Dye is a mixture of two or more dye colors. This is true of most of the Procion MX dyes sold by ProChem or any other supplier who sells many different colors, because there are only a dozen or so single-hue unmixed Procion dyes available anywhere. (They are listed on my page "Which Procion MX colors are pure, and which mixtures?".) Since there are no single-color greens in the Procion MX dye line, all greenish colors include at least one yellow and one blue. They may also contain some unexpected colors, such as a red, in order to darken and tone down the brightness of the color.

Depending on how you apply the dye, the different dyes in the mixture can separate out. You see this a lot when doing low water immersion dyeing (see "How to Do Low Water Immersion Dyeing"), and to a lesser extent when tie-dyeing or dye painting. Sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes, as in your case, a bad thing. You usually do not see it if you immersion dye with a high water ratio, as described on ProChem's instruction sheet, "Immersion Dyeing using PRO MX Reactive Dyes" [PDF]. A high ratio of water to fabric is important when you want to get a single solid color; so is frequent stirring. What method did you use? Did you use a large volume of water, or a small volume?

Another important point is that some fabrics look perfectly fine and white when you buy them, but they may have invisible stains, or an uneven distribution of spinning oils or sizing across the fabric, which will affect how the dye takes on the fabric. It's important to buy PDF clothing when possible, and when it's not possible, to prewash the clothing in the hottest water it can stand, with detergent and some extra soda ash for added cleaning power. Even the best method of prescouring fabric will sometimes fail, however. Some sizings, such as starch, are very difficult to remove, and can cause problems in dyeing.

How can you fix the problem? Two approaches. One is to try to remove the dye you've applied, and the other is to overdye the sweater to make the overall effect more pleasing. 

To remove the dye, you can try either a reductive color remover such as Thiox or Rit Color Remover, or, if the sweater is 100% bamboo (no spandex!), you can try chlorine bleach, which contains hypochlorite. Take a look at my page, "What chemicals can be used to remove dye?". I prefer the reductive color removers, because they are not as harsh on the fabric, but they work best when heated. If a reductive discharge chemical doesn't work, hypochlorite bleach might, or vice versa; it's impossible to predict. The dye removal chemicals might remove all of the dye, or part of it, or none; they might even leave an unexpected color.

Overdyeing is often an excellent solution to this sort of problem. It often works very well with no color removal at all. Just start over again, as though you were dyeing for the first time; additional layers of color will combine with the colors that are already there. If you try color removal and it works partially, you'll most likely want to dye again in order to get the color you want. In your case, since you have yellowish areas on a mostly teal sweater, I would want to overdye it with a blue dye. Blue dye will turn your yellowish spots green, and it will turn your teal sections a bluer blue-green. 

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