I'm hoping that you don't mind that I am emailing you with my question (I was searching websites and came across yours).  I have seen t-shirts that have been dyed with coffee, different types of alcohol (beer, wine etc) and chocolate.  Can we do this at home as well?  The colours are very beautiful and was wondering if this is possible.  Would the t-shirts be  coloured to start with or would a natural dye made with say chocolate produce this result?  I would love to hear back from you if you have the chance.

The problem with those shirts that you have seen is that they are kind of a scam. Note that when they say they are dyed "with" or "from" those natural substances, they do not specify that they used *only* those substances. My guess is that they may have added a tiny bit of the food or drink in question to either a dyebath of synthetic dyes, or, more likely, synthetic pigment "dyes" (which are not actually true dyes); then again, they may have omitted the foodstuff altogether.

You simply cannot dye cotton to be truly washfast with beer or wine or chocolate. You may be able to get a light stain, but not a reliable wash-proof dye. Unlike proper dyes, the coloring agents in these foodstuffs have little affinity for cotton, and will not stay. Coffee and tea can be used as dyes, but they are not permanent on cotton and will gradually fade, if you launder them. Most pigments found in foods cannot in themselves dye cotton at all well, though they can in theory be glued to them by using a binder such as is used in fabric paint. (You can dye cotton with grapes, if you mordant with alum and then with tannin and then with alum again, heat the cotton with the grapes repeatedly for several days, avoiding boiling since boiling will turn the grapes brown, but I would not advise you to wash a shirt dyed this way.)

Here's an example. The company Crazy Shirts Hawaii sells wine-colored t-shirts described as follows: "Like fine wine, this T improves with age. We color our soft 100%-cotton T with specialty dye made from red wine, and the result is deep, rich and full bodied." However, as famed tie-dyer Michael Fowler pointed out in a discussion of this subject on his old Tie-dyed.com forum, if you look closely at the picture, you can see from the color of the tag in the neck of the shirt on their site that this is a pigment-dyed shirt. Real dyes will not "take" on the synthetic material of the tag, but the fabric paints known as pigment dyes will. The primary pigment in the shirts cannot be the anthocyanins that naturally color wine, because these chemicals are unstable when laundered (or even during the dyeing stage) and will end up turning brown, not improving with age by any means. It is pretty much certain that the "specialty dye made from red wine" contains a large proportion of wine-colored synthetic pigment. There's probably little difference between them and any other wine-colored pigment-dyed t-shirt from any other vendor.

Another example: "A tangy favorite! Our Key Lime dye dips into Florida Key Limes to get that tart citrus green. With it, we dye our creamy-soft 100%-cotton Crewnecks and Scoop Necks and add imaginiative CrazyShirts designs." Of course, ripe Key limes are not green at all; they are yellow. Furthermore, Key limes are no longer commercially produced in Florida; the Key limes we see for sale in the US come from Mexico. Unripe Key limes would be a terrible dye, because chlorophyll simply does not work at all well as a dye. Throughout history, green clothing and green tapestry yarn have been prepared by dyeing twice, once with the natural blue dye indigo, and then again with a yellow dye such as weld. Green plants were not used as a source of green dye, because the color produced is muddy and tends to fade or turn brown in the light. To add more humor to the claims about how these shirts were dyed, the "Key lime" shirts are a bluish green, certainly not the color of any lime, and not the color that a green plant produces if one insists on using it as a dye.

A practical issue concerning dying t-shirts with food is the sheer quantity of the foodstuff required. To dye fiber with a natural dye, you typically need to use at least an equal weight of natural dyestuff to fabric, somethings two or three times as much. Imagine - if it were possible to dye a t-shirt with chocolate, you'd need one to three pounds of chocolate for every pound of fabric! Even if the color of the chocolate were not just a stain that would wash out, would it be worth spending the money on that much chocolate, without even getting to eat any of it? Picking on Crazy Shirts Hawaii yet again: "The darkest, mellowest Rum is smooth as velvet - and that's what we use in our specialty dye for our Rum-Dyed Ts." Can you imagine using an entire quart of expensive dark rum to dye one t-shirt? Nobody does that! And a good thing, too, because the color produced could only disappoint you. Cotton is a fiber that is far more difficult to dye than wool; many natural dyes that work on wool are practically useless on cotton. Beer and rum are not going to produce exciting results even on wool, though.

In contrast, red dirt really can be used as a dye, though the only long-lasting color to result, iron buff, is a tan color, not the exciting bright red color of clay that inspires people to want to use it for dyeing. The easiest way to get a long-lasting bright color from red clay is to use it as a pigment and mix it with a clear acrylic binder manufactured for use in fabric paint, such as Versatex Clear Extender. A traditional Japanese alternative would be to use freshly made soy milk as a binder, though the results are less resistant to laundering; see Table Rock Llamas for one set of instructions.

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