Originally Posted by
Peckish
I don't think Vicki Welsh's method (nutshell: soak in 140° F water with a dab of Dawn for 12 hours) is any more extreme than washing your fabrics five, six, or seven times.
It's actually easier and less wasteful.
Cindi and I took a hand-dyeing class in Houston this year. Here are some things we learned:
1. Dawn dish soap does the exact same thing that Synthrapol does: it suspends the dye in the water and helps prevent the dye from being absorbed by other fabrics. According to several professional hand-dyers ("professional" meaning people buy their hand-dyed producs), Dawn is actually marginally better at it, while also being very affordable and very available, unlike Synthrapol.
2. Color catchers are a waste of money.
3. Be very, very careful when rinsing your hand-dyes out in a hotel bathtub.
I’m using this method right now to rinse out the excess dyes on the fabrics we dyed.
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It’s amazing how well Dawn gets the excess dye out of the fabric - and no, it doesn’t fade the fabric at all. As far as the bathtub, I don’t think you’ll have the problem we had - we were doing newly-dyed fabrics that were saturated with a ton of dye. Yours won’t have anything remotely close that much dye in them. But, if you do get a little staining, granular dishwasher soap or bleach will take the dye right off the tub. Dawn is much cheaper than Synrapol, and I’m buying a gallon bottle of it to keep for just this reason, lol...