Adventures in Dying

I had a super fun day yesterday doing dye experiments as I get ready to teach a class in Fiber Reactive Dying at the Creative Lab in Boulder next month.

I washed, with Dharma’s professional Textile Detergent, 4 pair of dingy (faded to yellow not faded to white) jeans and 1 set of green jeans for tie dying.

All the jeans I worked with were grimy after washing even if the photos don’t show it well. I’m putting this photo in to show what I mean by grimy as opposed to faded. Faded can be stylish and there are lots of cool ways to distress to get that look, but grimy is just gross. In fact, even the “good” faded jeans have too much grime in them to resell, but not enough to show up in this photo. I’m an upcycler, so my goal is to get clothes back into circulation.

I forgot to handle with gloves to prevent my fingerprints from leaving residue. Oh well.

I also didn’t weigh the jeans before they went in the wash and wanted to dye them while they were still wet, so I just weighed a different pair that were dry. They were 17.8 0z. 16 oz in a pound so a little more than 1 pound for a pair of jeans. I figured the standard 1 TBS dye and 3 gallons of water would work for each pair of jeans dyed with indigo.

At this point I realized I have Hot water fiber reactive black dye and that I couldn’t do all my dyeing outside, so I laid plastic down in the kitchen.

STEPS

1 wash

2 past, slurry, (urea, strain), mix 3 G water 1 TBS dye for 1 pair jeans (2TBS for black)

3 add 3 C salt (for black 6 C salt), and 2 tsp Casolene oil

4 add wet fabric

5 stir gently for 20 min (130 to 180 temp for black hot reactive dye)

6 dissolve soda ash w warm water and add slowly over 15 min (don’t let it pour directly on the fabric)

7 rinse

8 wash alone on hot with textile detergent

168 INDIGO BLUE 202406

I chose jeans that were dark blue, close to the color I was going for but with dingy yellow areas. In the photos the area only looks faded, but up close it was very brownish yellow.

I followed the directions as closely as I could. After the 20 minutes of agitation, I started stirring less frequently as I added the soda ash mixture. I was starting a black vat in the kitchen and split my attention. After stirring in the soda ash for 15 minutes I let it sit for another 45 min for a total of 1hr plus the first 20 minutes. I rinsed with the hose and then double rinsed in the washer, then washed on hot, normal wash with the fancy detergent.

INDIGO BLUE RESULTS

I’m thrilled with the results. All the grime is gone and I have jeans that are completely wearable.

I did get some streaking; you can see on the left side in the photo. While I did take care to add the soda ash to one side of the bucket, I wasn’t careful about stirring continually. Another way I could do a better with the soda ash is to add smaller amounts more frequently. In my mind once the dye had set in, the color was even. I’m thinking of making a drip funnel from an old water bottle and attaching it to the side of the bucket. I also think a plastic bin would work better than a bucket so I might try and track some down on Buy Nothing.

The thing I was most bothered by were the yellow grime areas. Those are fully gone. Lots of jeans have fading for stylish reasons so retaining some of that is all to the good. I also kind of liked the streaks which are a clear sign of hand work. In my view they give the redyed pants a bit of soul, so I’m only interested in doing further tests for mastery of the process. I also want to do a test pouring the soda ash dilution along the pants legs for intentional streaking and see how that goes.

My theory on why the grimy areas cleared up is that the soda ash lifted most of it away. This is because my friend Elena once said she washed things in soda ash to prep them for natural dyeing and that the dingy garments had come fully clean. I also have an experiment I’ve been wanting to do with just washing grimy jeans in soda ash to see if they can keep the rest of their character, but I’ve now dyed all the grimiest of my jeans.

815 EBONY BLACK 201002

I thought I’d try some ice dyeing with these green jeans. Then I realized the dye I bought needs heat, so I changed the plant to a tie dye approach.

I scrunched each leg up and tied it with cotton seams left over from other upcycle projects. Then I dyed them black.

For black dye, the website directions said to double the dye amount. I was going from memory and thought it was 2 TBS so I thought I needed 4 and I put the whole 2oz container in. Oops. Possibly wasteful. The jeans were moist from the wash and hanging around for an hour but since its tie dye I wasn’t as worried about even colors and I didn’t wet them again. I heated the three gallons on the stove and used my industrial cook pot. I also didn’t bother stirring so regularly. Here is how they turned out.

A mistake I have made in the past is to release the ties before all the rinsing and washing was done. This time I went the other direction and didn’t release them until after they were dry. Now I’ll have to wash them again to get the wrinkles out. But I do love how they look. There is very little of the original green left because of how thin my ties were. I’m a fan of teal so I still love them. Ebony black skews towards blue so I figured it was a safe choice with green, since green has blue in it.

In retrospect I might have read the tie dye instructions on the website or have used some thicker ties so the green area I kept was wider.

Hat after using ebony black for one round of dye

After adding the soda ash, I decided to try dyeing one of my denim hats that looked a bit dingy. You can see in the headband and brim, that some of the grimy yellow is showing up. It was a spontaneous decision, so this hat wasn’t washed

I took the flower off and dunked the hat in the sink and added it to the black vat for about 2 or 3 minutes before pulling it out. It seemed to get total dark in that short time.

But after rinsing and washing it the hat turned out a blueish grey (much darker than it appears against my cutting matt) with the lining going totally black. It was a thin cotton inside. 2 min is all that fabric needed.

Before I dyed it every other section was a different color, as you can see in the previous photo. I expected the different denims would take the dye to different extents and that it would retain some of that character. I was surprised that they didn’t. The color is very uniform now. I wish I knew if the denim I used came from different jeans with different fabric content or if they came from two sides of the same jeans. It would be great to be able to dye pieces from different jeans together to get uniform colors where I want them, so while it wasn’t what I expected, it was kind of exciting in terms of future projects. I’ll probably dye things before constructing when I’m attempting color matched denim. And obviously they will all go in the same dye vat at the same time. And of course, I’m thrilled that the denim in the hat looks fresh now and doesn’t have any of the grim showing.

Over dye grimy medium blue jeans in second round of Ebony black

After finishing the green tie die pants in the black dye, I continued adding jeans to over-dye them. I figured I had put in twice the dye I needed so I should be able to get at least another set of black jeans out of the vat. I could see that the Ebony Black I was using was skewing in the blue direction, so I felt confident that if I didn’t get a black color, I’d at least get a darker blue. Because it already had soda ash in it, I didn’t add more. The second set of jeans cooked for 45 minutes.

This set had none of the streaking that my indigo blue pants experiment had, which makes sense as all the soda ash was already integrated. I’m not sure how much the soda ash being in the dye already interfered with color adhering. They did still retain some of their original fading, which I like, so I’m happy with these. Now they are dyed I think they might be good candidates for bleach painting to add a style element.

The Dharma Trading folks tell me the soda ash works as a fixative to set the color so it doesn’t fade, so I also don’t know how well the color will last in this set of jeans.

Overdying grimy light blue jeans in 3rd round of ebony black

I also did a third set. This one was the grimy light blue ones I used to show the difference between fading and grimy. I also lowered the pot to a simmer and only went 45 min. There has been no measuring of temperatures, just kinda cooking on medium. As I was stirring, the dye bath on this third set of jeans looked purple, most notable on the pockets on the inside which were magenta during dying.

When I washed them and dried them the color only has a slight purple hue and mostly looked blue. I’m sorry I took the two sets of photos in such different lighting conditions. It kind of ruins the before and after impact, but I think the results are clear.

A couple lessons in handling dye spills made me very glad I put a tarp on the kitchen floor. First my tongs are a great conduit for liquids so if I hold a garment at the top end of the tongs then all the dye running off it channels down the tongs and out onto my arm. Second, the pot with three gallons of water is too heavy for me to empty into the sink without it dribbling down the side and onto the floor. Next time I’ll put it in one half of the sink and aim for the other, so the dribbles go into the sink. Gosh I hope I remember to re-read my notes.