Immersion Dyeing w/ Fiber Reactive Dyes | Tie Dyeing

Watch more How to Tie Dye videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/510693-Immersion-Dyeing-w-Fiber-Reactive-Dyes-Tie-Dyeing One of the techniques that you can use for tie dyeing is called emerging dyeing and that's the most simple, easy to prepare of the dyeing techniques. It pretty much consists in preparing a dye vat in which you fully submerge the fabric. I'm going to explain you how to prepare a dye bath using fiber reactive dyes. First you start by picking your color and the color that I picked today is aqua, which will be a really cool bright blue. You're supplier will normally tell you how much you need to use but I sometimes don't totally follow the recipe so I like to start with little and then take a look at it and add more if I want the color to be stronger. But yeah, use less if you want a really subtle tones, use a lot if you want really dark colors. So using my measuring spoon I'm going to start by adding a little bit more than a quarter of a teaspoon to a little bit of water and I'm going to use a whisker to really mix it well. In the meantime, you also want to start soaking the fabric that you already tied and bundled with the pattern that you want to use. As an example, I used some rubber bands and I did a knot. So I'm going to soak it in water. The fibers always need to be wet before any dyeing technique. This just allow the dye to more easily penetrate in the fabric and then you'll just get the better dyeing result. While the fabric soaks, we're going to prepare our next step and that is to prepare the activator solution. For the activator, we're using soda ash or washing soda. The quantity that I'll use is a proportion of the water and your supplier will also provide you the recipe for this but just as a general note for a poundof fabric you normally use a gallon of water and for a gallon of water you'll use five teaspoons of washing soda. So I'm going to prepare my activator solution. And washing soda really likes to dissolve in hot water