Name: Kathy
Message: Hey Paula!
I was going to post this on Micheal's forum, but it seems to be down at the moment and curiousity is killing me. I am finding with my Raspberry MX dye(from Dharma) that it seems to be congealing as if it has thick print paste in it when stored in the fridge after a 24 hour period. This is not occuring with the other colors, even Turquoise which is a component of the Raspberry.
Honestly, I am just curious as why this is happening to this color and not the others. It is something new that has happened recently.

I've heard, though not recently, of this sort of thing happening for other people with fuchsia MX dye (red MX-8B, aka reactive red #11). Of course, it seems likely that your raspberry mixture contains a lot of fuchsia!

This fuchsia seems to cause most of the problems I hear about with MX dye. It refuses to dissolve, often, so that, for example, people machine-dyeing with Dharma's "Midnight Blue" end up with little red dots all over, unless they go to the immense bother of filtering the dissolved dye through pantyhose, and sometimes even then. It is also more reactive than other MX dyes, so it strikes the fabric more quickly, and goes bad in solution more quickly.

Personally, I think that it is usually better to substitute the very similar Light Red (Dharma's name) or Mixing Red (ProChem's name), which is red MX-5B or reactive red #2. Like red MX-8B, it is on the blue side of red, though not *quite* as blue. This dye always seems to perform more consistently with the other MX dyes. I don't like most purchased dye mixtures, because of the heavy reliance of the dyehouses on mixtures prepared with red MX-8B. I usually like to mix my own colors, for maximum control.