Jacquard Procion Tie Dye Powder 8-Color Set 2/3oz Jars - Powder Dye for Tie Dye - Permanent & Washfast Powder Tie Dye - Use as Ice Tie Dye Powder, Cold Water Dye for Fabric & Clothing Dye

I bought this kit to dye a few white t-shirts that I've been using as undershirts for the last few years. The t-shirts had perspiration stains under the arms, but I love the fabric and fit so much that I wanted to see if I could rescue them. Now, all the dyeing websites will tell you not to work on old, stained clothing. That is probably prudent advice, as I'll discuss later! I was willing to take the risk, especially as practice learning how to dye in case I decide on a larger project down the road.What I love about this set is that it contains the printer's primaries -- cyan, magenta, and yellow, plus black -- so that you can mix your own colors. With just three shirts to dye, I could have bought three premixed colors instead of four primaries. But I find that a bit limiting, and wanted to have fun mixing my own. This kit also includes enough soda ash to do about 5-6 dye baths (bucket method), but if you run out, Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda is 100% soda ash and readily available for a few bucks at the grocery store or drugstore.I dyed my shirts using the immersion method in a 5-gallon bucket (actually, mine was a 4-gallon kitty litter bucket). You can do this in the washing machine, but you have to use a lot more dye, soda ash, and salt, and you still have to babysit the machine to make sure it doesn't start the rinse cycle before you're ready. I find it more economical and not that much more labor-intensive to just do it in a bucket. For the first shirt, I was trying for sort of an indigo color, a deep blue-purple. I mixed 3/4 tsp. of the fuchsia dye and 1 1/4 tsp. of the turquoise in a mason jar and added a little bit of water to make a paste, then a little more water to get a pourable dye. I filled my bucket a little over halfway with water, added two cups of non-iodized table salt, stirred to dissolve, and then added the dye. Finally, I added my t-shirt, which I had dampened. After stirring off and on for about 20 minutes, I mixed 1/3 cup of soda ash into warm water in the mason jar and added a third of it to the bucket, stirred for 5 minutes, added another third, stirred for 5 minutes, then the last third and another 5 minutes of stirring. Finally, I gave the shirt another 45 minutes in the dye bath, stirring periodically. I put it in the washing machine, ran a rinse cycle, then washed it with detergent in hot water and tumbled dry. (This technique came from pburch.net, an incredibly thorough site on dyeing.)You can see the result in the far left of the customer image I uploaded. It's hardly the indigo I was going for! In fact, it was a happy accident, because I was planning to turn one of the t-shirts into a raspberry color, and that's exactly what I got. But what went wrong? Well, I did a little research and learned that turquoise is a particularly finicky dye. On the Procion dye jars, it says to mix the dye into cold water, and that's where I went wrong. My research revealed that the water should in fact be at *least* room temperature, if not warmer for turquoise. I even saw some suggestions to put the dye-soaked fabric in the microwave to accelerate the process!I wasn't brave enough to do that, but I was happy to try warmer water with my second shirt. This time, I placed my bucket in a bathtub and filled it with warm-to-hot water, about 110 degrees. I also filled the bathtub with hot water to try to maintain the warm temperature in the bucket. I used much, much more turquoise in the second batch: 2 tsp. of turquoise and only 1/4 tsp. of fuchsia. Otherwise, I followed the procedure exactly as I had for the first shirt. The result was a very pretty periwinkle, not quite the rich indigo I had aimed for, but again, a lovely color I'm thrilled with.(I should note here that the amount of dye you use determines how light or dark the final result. It's suggested to use about 1 tablespoon of dye for a medium color or 2 tablespoons for a dark color, per pound of fabric. You scale up or down based on fabric weight. My t-shirts each weighed just 1/4 pound, so this suggests 1/4 tablespoon for medium or 1/2 tablespoon -- 1 1/2 teaspoons -- for dark. In fact I used more than this, yet got medium colors.)For my final shirt, I wanted to crack open the jar of yellow dye, so I decided to go green. I had definitely learned from the first two rounds that color mixing is an imprecise science. I wanted to err on the side of more turquoise rather than too much yellow (I love lime green but it doesn't suit my complexion at all), so I mixed 2 tsp. turquoise with 1/2 tsp. yellow. This gave a very pretty emerald, pretty much exactly the hue I was aiming for! However, this shirt ended up with blotches in spots and I can only conclude that there were some invisible marks or stains on the t-shirt that only became evident when I dyed it. This is one of the dangers of working with old fabric! Incidentally, I was most worried about the perspiration marks on the shirts, but in all cases those were nearly completely hidden by the dye.I would absolutely recommend this kit if you are willing to roll the dice a bit with respect to color. It's definitely a matter of guesswork, and I found that even testing the dye mix first on a small piece of paper towel or just observing the fabric while it was in the dye bath didn't really give a good indication of what the final result would look like. It's as much about how well the fabric takes the dye (and what technique you use, etc.) as it is about what proportions of colors you use. But it was great fun, and I still have enough dye for many more projects, especially if I replenish my turquoise supply.

My 100% cotton, lightest blue, duvet cover turned out gorgeous. It's now dark indigo (it's a bit bluer and darker than these phone pics with flash.) I had a half bottle of black liquid RIT dye sitting around so I added it to the mix, with this navy blue powder, because I wanted to make sure it came out dark enough. I thought it was going to come out dark ashy blue but I guess the RIT has some red in it. I did see red specks rinsing down the sides of my mixing bucket during prep so I'm not sure if it was from this powder or the liquid RIT. I'm OK with that because it's the original color I wanted. I just decided to go dark blue because I figured I'd have to buy 2 or 3 colors to get this beautiful dark indigo.It had yellowed from sweat, and it even had blood stains from old injuries on it. I used peroxide and ammonia and Persil, in cold water to lighten those. Then I washed it in hot water, with a bunch of Borax, soda Ash, 1 cup of salt (good for blood and protein,) and more Persil. That, surprisingly, got the old blood stains to fade the most, and the yellowed skin residue was almost unnoticeable -- should have done it a long time ago. I left the cover wet and started on my bucket mix.For a 4lb, king size cover, in my top-loading HE washer, it took 14 gallons of water, 8lbs of pickling salt, 18Tbs of this dye powder, and 1 1/2 cups of soda ash. (Technically, I ran out of soda ash so I added 1 cup of Borax and 1/2 cup of backing soda to 1 cup of soda ash, in a bowl of hot water. After stirring a lot, I strained that mix into the washing machine so the undesolved Borax wouldn't make my cover spotty, JIK.) I was religious about rearranging the cover every 5 minutes. I live at 5800 feet altitude so I added 10 minutes to the first, non-soda, stage, and 25 minutes to the soda-ash stage, so that's 25 minutes, then 1 hour and 25 minutes soaking time. Then I plugged the washer back in, let it fill up on a deep water, warm, cycle and let it run. It agitated the diluted mix for 45 minutes, then rinsed it twice. I then ran it through another almost-hot deep-water wash-and-double rinse cycle -- just water. (The rinses are always with cold water. This nicely allowed me to alternate hot and cold rinses.) I then added 14tsp of Jaquard color fixative to a single rinse & spin, deep-water, cycle. Finally, I washed the cover normally, in tap-cold water, with a bunch of other black clothes and some detergent, then dried it on low. Voila!I'm shocked at how even it came out, mainly because the unplugged washer seemed to be draining ever so slowly, to where I felt I needed more swishing room during the last 45 minutes. Instead of swishing I had to pick the cover up and dunk it again, which produced a lot of large bubbles. It was impoosible to keep it immersed over time (I even put heavy platic bottles on to.) It would have been easier to double the mix, up to 24 gallons of water, so I could stir and swish it around instead. (FYI, my recipe is already double-strength to ensure dark results.)My husband didn't believe it was the same cover. It's his favorite thing in the house, because it's soft and cool for sleeping, so I presented it to him with me wrapped under it. 😀My only other side note is don't do this before an interview or formal occasion. My hands look like a car mechanic's even though I wore long gloves and washed them every 5 minutes. In fact car grease is easier to was off. Keep rags handy for splatters, and remember to check your face and neck after each swishing. My wasing machine came out clean as a whistle though. A mild bleach cycle could be run through it if you want to be absolutely sure it's clean.