Dye Testing and Final Dyeing

The following steps and dye tests and final dyeing was done on different days, however I thought it best to save them all for one blog just so it all works together better, and it is easier to understand.

It is good practise to wear gloves and an apron to protect your skin and clothes from the dye fabric.

All of the dyes used are hot water dyes.

In the pictures above you can see the step for mixing up dyes. First you take a small amount of dye on the flat end of a spoon, and mix it in a small pot with warm water.

At this time it is good to start your water warming up to simmering, and adding salt to the water. The salt helps fix the dye to the fabric.

It is also good to wet your fabric before you dye it.

Once you have mixed the dye in a small pot, it is good to strain the dye through a thin fabric, this helps to get rid of any particles of the dye that did not dissolve properly.

In this case we were using Aribian Night, Madonna Blue and King Fisher Blue

Using the heat plates to warm up the water. At this point these are only dye tests to help choose the right colours, and so we only do dye tests in small pots because you don't need a lot of dye or water.

The next step is to put the dye mix in the simmering water and stir this around to distribute the dye evenly through out the water.

The next step is to add the dampened water to the dye and leave to dye for as long as you want.

Once the fabric has taken the dye to what ever strength you want, you turn off the water, drain the fabric and rinse out the fabric to remove excess dye.

Then you dry the fabric to see the real colour that the dye has left behind on the fabric.

For each new dye we had to repeat the above tests three times for each different dye.

For my own curiosity and to give a plain fabric as a comparison for how the dyes took I also dyed this fabric along side the striped fabric.

The fabric dye test for Arabian Night but left in the solution for different amounts of time

King Fisher Blue dye test

Madanna Blue dye test

So having shown these dye tests to the designer it was decided that King Fisher Blue was too bright and vibrant. However we should then dye test the Arabian Night and Madonna Blue but on a timed dye test, to get a lighter less concentrated look to the dyes.

So we tested the final chosen fabric again in a relatively weak solution, leaving the fabric in to dye for 10, 20 and 30 seconds.

These results we showed to our designer and it was decided that we would dye out fabric to look like the 20 second Madonna Blue dye.

This was good news considering that the Arabian Night dye is not longer being manufactured and there is not a lot left in the dye pot.

Having found out final colour it was on to dyeing all 4 metres of the fabric that we had.

The large metal vat is the dying vat, it is split off into two sections. The large vat and the smaller vat. The large vat has two heaters underneath the griddle that protects the fabric from the heaters, the small vat only has one.

The two pipes coming off from the wall are taps, one is hot water and one is cold, colour coded red or blue accordingly.

This red screw top that you see in the left picture above is like the plug hole, before filling up the vat with water you need to close off the plug hole or the water you are trying to put in will all run out.

Before we could get to dying the fabric we had to wash it in a washing machine to get rid of any surface chemicals and dust left behind from the factory that may inhibit the ability for the fabric to take dye.

It is easiest to fill up the vat with hot water, making it easier for the heater to warm up the water.

The vat takes a long time to fill up but should never be left unattended, when filling up or when dying.

We filled up three quarters of the dye water with hot water.

Our damp 4 metres of fabric waiting in the large dye vat for us to finish making up the solution.

Before we could dye all of our fabric we has to do a couple more tests to make sure the dye in the vat was at the right strength.

It took us adding 4 separate small bowls of dye to get the water to the right strength for dying.

Then at the right strength we laid the fabric in to the dye vat and kept on moving the fabric around to prevent the dye from settling stronger in certain parts of the fabric.

Dyeing all of our fabric took maybe half and hour of constant gentle mixing, checking every so often against the agreed upon original test to make sure the fabric has dyed to the correct colour and strength.

Our fabric happily swirling around absorbing all the dye that it can.

I need to take a picture of what the final dyed dry fabric looks like to give you an idea of how it turned out because my partner and I are both very happy with the results.