Washing Out Loose Dye
Posted by Steven Lee on 27th Jan 2025
After dyeing fabric, no matter which tie dye pattern you use, or after a solid color dye process, you must now wash out the loose dye that did not fix to the fabric.
First, I will describe how we wash out the loose dye, then if you’d like to read further, I will talk about why we use this process.
When tie dyeing, after we apply the dye, we leave the fabric tied up and leave it alone for as long as our time frame allows, usually overnight. Warm environments allow better dye fixation.
To wash out loose dye:
- Leave fabric tied up.
- Take to sink and flood fabric with cold running water.
- Rinse with cold running water until water begins to run clear.
- Increase water temperature to warm and untie while rinsing.
- Wash in hot water with dish washing detergent or laundry detergent if washing in a washing machine.
- Rinse in cold water.
- Repeat wash if necessary.
These washing instructions (mostly) match original Procion MX dye instructions provided by the original cold water reactive dye manufacturer. Their wash out instructions were usually stated simply as “Wash off – Conventional reactive dye wash-off sequence: cold water rinse (with overflow), boiling wash, cold rinse.”
When washing out loose dye from tie dye, painting, stamping or other direct application methods, our main goal is to prevent color migration or staining white areas. This staining or color migration is a common problem and cannot always be prevented due to the high substantivity of these dyes. Substantivity is basically the attraction of the dye to the fiber.
We have found that leaving the fabric tied up initially and rinsing with cold running water helps prevent color migration and staining of white areas. Cold temperatures in the rinse help to prevent the staining of the loose dye coming off the fabric, and the flowing rinse water helps carry away loose dye. This rinse also helps remove the soda ash alkaline which will help to prevent dye fixation to places where it’s not wanted.
The next step, hot water wash with detergent, helps to scour away the loose, unfixed dye. The original Procion MX instructions recommend “Wash off the material at a temperature as close to the boil as possible by any of the conventional ways;” We find this instruction impractical as most washing machines do not use water at boiling temperatures, and most tie dyers or fiber artists are wary of washing their creations in super hot water. We therefore recommend washing the fabrics in as hot water as you dare or feel comfortable using and washing as many times as needed to remove all the loose dye, with cold water rinses after each warm to hot water wash cycle.
You will know that you have washed out the loose dye when no more dye is coming off the water and wash/ rinse cycles are clear.
Tumble or hang dry the finished fabric as desired.
This is how we wash loose dye from the projects we dye. Different dyers have developed many different wash out procedures that work for their individual needs.