Name: Nathan

Region: Portland, Oregon

Message: I'm looking to dye some 75 percent cotton, 25 percent polyester gray t-shirts black. Because I'm just trying to get a uniform black color, do I still need to lay out my fabric flat and drip the Procion MX over it (as dictated in your "How to Hand Dye with Fiber Reactive Dye" document) or can  I just soak the material in a bucket overnight containing the dye?

Thanks for your info - I've never dyed before, and I'm glad I came here before buying some junky dye at the grocery store!

Your instincts are good; the best method for a solid color is not directly painting or dripping the dye on. It's better, for a uniform color, to use a 5-gallon bucket, or a washing machine. The recipes for this method take only an hour or so, however, because it's a faster technique. You should stir the shirt a lot with the dye to get the color even, and use a lot of salt, which is not needed at all in the recipe you have already been looking at, plus soda ash to fix the dye, as in the other recipe.

The washing machine makes solid-color dyeing easy, especially if you're dyeing more than one. You can dye a full five to eight pounds of fabric at once (weigh the shirts while they're dry) in a single top-loading washing machine load. Or, you can use the washing machine recipe, in smaller quantities, to dye just a couple of shirts in a large plastic bucket. See my page, "How can I dye clothing or fabric in the washing machine?". (There's a link on that page to Dharma Trading Company's recipe for dyeing in a bucket or a washing machine.)

I'm afraid that you won't be able to conveniently dye those shirts black, though. If you use any dye that works on cotton, you will be able to get only a 75% color intensity, since polyester will never accept a cotton dye. The polyester in the blend will remain unchanged in color. That means you won't be able to get darker than a medium-dark gray, using the best dyes in a single-step process.

You can either accept this medium-dark gray, or you can also dye the polyester in the fiber blend, by using an entirely different type of dye, which does not work on cotton. The two different fibers require two different types of dye, there's no getting around that fact. Even so-called "all purpose" dye will not color the polyester at all. All-purpose dyes such as Rit or Tintex will just wash out of the polyester, and of course they will not last as long on the cotton as Procion MX dye will. 

Unfortunately, polyester is much more difficult and annoying to dye than cotton is. The only kind of dye that works on it is called disperse dye, and this dye has to be cooked on the stovetop with the shirts, in a huge cooking pot, in order to get the dye to take on the polyester. I would be happy to tell you about where to buy disperse dye, and how to use it on polyester, and even how to use it at the same time as a cotton dye (and how to make this other cotton dye not wash out too quickly), but I'm not at all sure it would be worth the trouble for you. See "Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes".

It would be so much easier to either find 100% cotton shirts to dye black, or to accept the medium-dark grey you can get by dyeing only the cotton part of the cotton/poly blend. It's also a lot cheaper to stick to cool-water dyes such as Procion MX dye, because they don't require you to invest in a large cooking pot to use for dyeing (especially since you should not plan to reuse a dyeing pot for food preparation). There's no such thing as a cool-water dye for polyester, and five-gallon non-aluminum cooking pots are expensive.

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