Name: Vanessa

Country: UK
Message: Hi Paula,

Wow If I had found this site BEFORE my issue I could have asked if this would have worked.

I have been dyeing things for years, but I never tried it on a pattern. I tried to add yellow to a swirly pattern tee shirt so that instead of the original  bright green, white, grey, black, It would affect just the yellow (or so I hoped! ) This did not work out well!! The black and green are still reasonably fine, the white areas are definitely yellow, I did not realize the grey areas would be a pea soup / disgusting green color. 

Now instead of looking bright and fresh color palette, it looks murky and horrid. Is there anything I can do to rid the grey of the pea soup green or remove all the Dylon dye and just start over with a fresh tshirt? They don't sell this anymore! 

If I use a color stripper, Im sure it will remove the original black, grey, and green. Or a color  run remover may not fix this. Is there any possibly way I can remove the dye I added without stripping the original colors and patterns from this garment? It is viscose / elastane, and feels like a t-shirt.

Thanks so much for any help! As of now, it is soaking in very hot water with washing powder before I let dye set after removing from the wash.

Thank you
Vanessa


You're right that using a color stripper risks removing the colors you want, and yet it might be possible. Are the colors printed on? If so, can you, perhaps, detect a tiny, tiny amount of roughness where the print is? If you can feel the printed colors at all. then, it may very well have been printed with pigments (essentially fabric paint), instead of with dyes. Pigments tend to be resistant to color removing. However, sometimes prints are made with reactive dyes, in which case your printed design may be susceptible to the same treatments that will remove your unwanted dye color.

Which kind of Dylon dye did you use? There is one type of Dylon dye which is susceptible to washing powder and hot water; this is the line known as Dylon Multi Purpose dye. The other lines of Dylon dye are far more permanent, though, including Dylon Hand Dye, Dylon Machine Dye, Dylon Cold Dye, and Dylon Permanent Dye, all of which contain fiber reactive dyes. Fiber reactive dyes are very good dyes on cotton, so they won't wash out in hot water.

You might want to try painting a dye-remover onto the fabric just over the gray parts of the pattern, so that you can remove your yellow dye without risking the rest of the design. Since the fiber blend includes elastane (also known as spandex), you must avoid using chlorine bleach, which will destroy elastane, leaving holes in the fabric. That leaves the sulfur-based dye removers. In the UK, a good source for discharging agents is Fibrecrafts/George Weil. They sell Jacquard Discharge Paste, which is thick enough to paint on the fabric where you want it. I don't know how complex the design is; if it's simple, this won't be too bad, but if it's very complex, it will take more time than the shirt is worth to you. Apply the discharge paste with a short stiff brush or whatever tool seems to work best, let it dry, then steam it to activate it, using a steam iron, or by wrapping it up in unprinted newsprint paper and steaming it over boiling water, as you might steam vegetables, for ten minutes. One worry is that heat is not good for elastane. Take a look at the care instructions for the shirt: it may tell you to use only cool water to wash it.

Another option is to add yet another color. You could use a fabric paint just where you want it (again, only if the design is simple enough for this to not take forever), or you could overdye the t-shirt as a whole. Yellow plus grey made a pea green for you. Overdye the entire garment with blue, and it will become a different shade of green, which you might like better. Of course, the more color you add, the more muted the black pattern will become, against the parts of the shirt that started out being green, white, and grey. It's better than having a shirt of a color you hate, though.

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