Name: Douglas
Message: Hi! Great site with lots of info. However I couldn't find anything about making a photographic backdrop. I have bought muslin and would like to dye it brown with a splotchy or mottled effect. . any ideas? I bought RIT dye to do this with. Is this a good brand? If you would like a sample like the drop I am trying to duplicate, I can send you a very small jpeg. .
Thanks in advance for your help!



There are several reasons why most dye artists recommend against dyeing cotton with all-purpose dye. (Rit is one brand of all-purpose dye.)

For best results, all-purpose dye should be simmered with the fabric for half an hour or an hour on the stovetop, in a cooking pot which will never again be used for food (since the dye is not food-safe). All-purpose dye can be applied in the washing machine, but the results will not be very permanent, because the water never gets near the optimum temperature for the dye to stick to the fiber. Even when used correctly, this type of dye is not very colorfast in the laundry.

How big are your backdrops going to be? I find it hard to imagine a cooking pot large enough to dye a backdrop in!

All-purpose dye is also extraordinarily expensive for large pieces of fabric. One box of a commonly available brand costs $2.75 and will dye only 1.5 yards of fabric to a medium intensity. In contrast, a $4 jar of a good fiber reactive dye (MX fiber reactive dye from http://www.prochemical.com) will dye 14 yards of muslin - almost ten times as much!

Fiber reactive dye is much easier to use than all-purpose dye, as well. Instead of heating it, you just add soda ash, to enable the reaction between the dye and the cotton.

I recommend that you mail-order some brown MX fiber reactive dye (one shade or, even better, several different shades) from http://www.prochemical.com or another company on my page of sources for dye supplies at http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/dyesources.shtml, and follow the recipe for low water immersion dyeing, at http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/lowwaterimmersion.shtml . You will need soda ash, but you will not need urea, and salt is optional.

If you are planning to dye a very large piece of fabric, I recommend that you do a test run of dyeing a cotton t-shirt or something else small, first, just to make sure you understand how to do it. It is more difficult to handle large pieces of fabric, though it helps a great deal to be doing it all at room temperature.