Step By Step Fiber Reactive Dyeing Process
Fiber reactive dyes (also called “reactive dyes,” “cold process dyes,” “FRDs”, “fiber dyes”, and “Procion* type dyes”) are one of the world’s best inventions for home dyers. They’re incredibly easy to use, affordable, easy to find online, not heat activated, and used in a heap of different applications.
I love fiber reactive dyes so much, I’ve built my livelihood on them! Here at WAXON, we don’t use anything but fiber reactive dyes. In this post I’ll be detailing for you all the myriad methods and techniques you can use in the fiber reactive dyeing process to get great results at home with FRDs.
*Procion MX is the brand name of the Jacquard company’s fiber reactive dyes, but it’s used interchangeably with FRDs these days, kind of like Kleenex/tissue. “MX” is what it actually is. Read more further down.
What Is Fiber Reactive Dyeing?
Fiber reactive dyes are cold water dyes that are fixed chemically, instead of with heat. Hence the alternative name for them, “cold water dyes” or “color process dyes.”
No heat, means no stove, hooray! This unique property sets fiber reactive dyes apart from other types of dye and makes them queen of home tub dyeing, batik, and tie dye.
Because they can be used away from the stovetop, they are also the ideal dyes for shibori, ice dyeing, and low water immersion dyeing, plus printing, direct painting, and other alternative dye applications.
Fiber reactive dyes form a strong covalent bond with cellulosic fibers, which means the color is not on the fabric, it’s molecularly fused into the fibers of the fabric, at the cellular level. This makes it the most permanent and wash-fast of all safe-for-home-use dyes.
When you do fiber reactive dyeing, you’re combining the dye powder (either in powder or liquid form), the plant fiber, and the fixative (usually soda ash) to create permanent colored fibers. There are tons of different ways to use these dyes! The top methods are:
Bottle dyeing (aka tie-dye)
Tub or immersion style dyeing (like Shibori and Low-water immersion dyeing)
Ice dyeing
Batik (using wax as the resist)
Painting/stamping (either with liquid or thickened dyes)
To learn more about these techniques and these dyes keep on reading!
Don’t want to read? Would you rather watch and learn? I have a great FREE mini-class all about how to use fiber reactive dyes three different ways.
I talk about the chemistry and the benefits of these dyes, plus demo how to use them at home safely and effectively to create beautiful hand-dyed clothing & fabrics. It’s about an hour long. Check it out!
FREE class! Let me show you what this blog post is talking about.
(You do have to sign up to get access, but I really don’t send emails out very often— trust me! I’m way too busy to spam you.)
What Fabrics Can I Use a Reactive Dyeing Process On?
Fiber reactive dye is the dye of choice for all cellulose fibers. Cellulose means “from a plant”— like cotton, rayon, hemp, bamboo, Tencel, and more.
I even have a whole easy-access list of everything that’s dyeable with fiber reactive dyes and what isn’t. Check out the page cellulose fibers and add a bookmark for coming back to later.
My favorite strategy for practicing with these dyes, by the way, is to go to my local thrift stores and look for anything made from a natural, plant-based fiber. It doesn’t even need to be white to start with!
If you find, for example, a great linen skirt or a nice cotton button-down shirt and it has stains on it, that’s fair game, too. You can dye over stains and the garment will be good as new, upcycled, and saved from the landfill.
As a side note, a lot of people know that cotton is a plant, and maybe they’re aware of linen (flax) and hemp (cannabis) fibers. But most folks are surprised to learn that fabrics like rayon and viscose are also made from plants! I have a whole blog post about these “reconstituted plant fibers” and how they take the dyes. Spoiler alert: they love them.
Types & Sources Of Reactive Dyes
Fiber reactive dyes are sold by a few major (and several minor) companies. Either by the name “fiber reactive” or “Procion/MX” or “procion type dyes,” or “MX dyes,” they’re all talking about the same type of dye.
All fiber reactive dyes are in the same specific class or type of dye. They’re formulated differently depending on which company or manufacturer is making them, but they are all made from the same chemicals, and they vary by color, shade, and intensity.
Fun fact: all colors of FRDs are made from the same 11 “standardized” colors— only eleven! So if you really want to mix your own shades, you only need ever to buy these eleven colors, and all variations under the sun can be mixed yourself.
I’m going to list my favorite sources here, in order of popularity (or at least, popularity as I perceive it, being witness to many conversations over many years about where to get these dyes). I’m not being paid by any of them, by the way. Got another great source? Leave a note in the comments at the bottom of the page.
Dharma Trading Company
Maybe the most used and most well-known, at least in the United States. Quite the large operation here, and I’ve never had a bad customer service experience. Their shipping is exorbitant and only free once a year, but boy do they have all the goods. 100+ core colors plus seasonal offerings and “muck” (seconds) colors, they also make sure you don’t forget your soda ash by adding a little pop-up window when you add FRDs to your cart. Plus a huge collection of dyeable blanks of all kinds. Shop them here.
Jacquard
They’re the ones who manufacture Procion MX dyes— which are fiber reactive dyes. These dyes are more readily available overseas and therefore used more often in Europe, this brand is cool because they have a user forum for Q&A. They don’t sell directly, but you can buy them everywhere online and in stores (which means you don’t have to deal with the high shipping prices of their biggest competitor). They don’t have as many colors as Dharma, but they have plenty to keep you entertained and mixing your own new shades for decades. Start here.
Grateful Dyes
AKA Colorado Wholesale Dye Inc., these guys are not nearly as big as the aforementioned companies but they have a great line of fiber reactive dyes and an impressively large collection of colors. They also, handily, sell blanks ready to dye. Support the little guys!
Custom Colours
They need a mention because they’re in my home state of NC. Run by one man (Dave C.) whose health is said to be unfortunately often failing, the website has its issues and they are often not taking any orders. The main site takes you a few different places depending on what you want to buy (i.e., bulk? Try his eBay) but the main dye page is here.
How To Dye Cotton With Fiber Reactive Dyes: The Reactive Dyeing Process Explained
Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you know there are at least five major technical paths you can follow with these dyes to do different types of dyeing. Readers, I can’t take you through each one here in this post— that’s dozens of different posts combined into one!
I’m going to give it my best shot to break down the essential elements that all the processes have in common. Remember, I have separate blog posts about many of these, such as DIY ice dyeing.
Element #1 - The Activator
Fiber reactive dyes need to be activated by bringing the alkalinity of the fabric way up, aka raising the pH. The cheapest, safest, and easiest way of doing that is to use soda ash powder.
Soda ash, henceforth referred to as SA, is a cousin of baking soda. Baking soda is sodium bicarbonate and SA is sodium carbonate. It comes in powder form and can be really affordable if a) you buy it locally and avoid shipping it, because it’s heavy, and b) you buy in bulk.
Here at WAXON, we get our SA powder from the pool supply store in 50 lb. bags, and it’s just over $1/lb. You can find it for a lot more money from online suppliers and in smaller quantities, but it’s definitely cheaper to buy in bulk.
You don’t have to use SA to activate your dyes, but you have to use something to bump the pH way up. There are more expensive products on the market (like pH-Up and pH-increasers) but you should just do what most dyers do and buy SA powder.
SA goes onto your project, or into your dye bath, depending on what type of dye method you’re doing, and at different times of the project depending… but it always is used with fiber reactive dyes. They just do not work without a very highly alkaline environment. You must use SA (or something similar) if you’re dyeing with fiber reactive dyes.
Element #2 — Resists/Patterns
Are you doing direct application (bottle) tie-dye? Then you’ll be creating patterns in your fabric by folding, twisting, or binding areas of it, creating a resist for the dye to have to push through (or get blocked by).
Same thing for ice dye, but instead of mixing your dyes with water into a squeeze bottle, you’ll be sprinkling them on dry, either under or over ice cubes, and leaving it all to melt.
In batik, the resist comes from putting hot wax onto the fabric so that it soaks all the way through to the back side, blocking the dye from penetrating those areas. In Shibori dyeing, resists are created by clamping, folding, or stitching designs into the fabric.
In low-water immersion dyeing, you don’t have to do anything except crumple or shove the fabric into a too-small container, with just barely enough dye to cover the surface, and the resist happens because the dye just can’t move evenly through the fabric!
No matter what kind of dyeing you’re doing, unless you’re doing a stone-cold solid (which is difficult to achieve), you’re gonna put some kind of pattern into your project for the dye to work around.
Element #3 — Curing Time
Most fiber reactive dyes need to sit for about 24 hours to let the chemical reaction fully process. The dyes and the soda ash and the cellulosic molecules of the fiber are all reacting to each other, creating a permanent bond.
In some forms, you can wait a little less time or a little longer, depending on temperature, but all fiber reactive dyes process fully at room temperature in about 24 hours. All dye methods that use fiber reactive dyes share these three elements: use of the activator, how you create pattern, and what you do to make the dye resist going in certain areas, and it always needs time to cure.
Even a batik artist who has never ice dyed, or a Shibori dyer who is learning to thicken and paint dyes onto fabric, will be considering these three elements in their work, if they are using fiber reactive dyes.
Reasons To Use a Reactive Dyeing Process
As Dharma’s website says, “There is no better dye for natural fabrics than [Fiber Reactive Dyes]. This is the eye-catching dye you've seen on tie-dye shirts and other items sold at street fairs and concerts. Brilliant, mouth-watering, and permanent. They don't fade, even after repeated washings. They are economical, safe, and easy to use. Superior to supermarket dyes in every way!” And I agree wholeheartedly with all of that.
More from Dharma: “They are even sometimes used for silk because they are so economical. Because they don't come off [the fabric], they are even safe on infant clothing and clothing for chemically sensitive folks, once excess dye and chemicals are properly washed out. They are economical, and easy to use. Superior to supermarket dyes in every way!”
My favorite reasons to use them is that they are super affordable, very effective and long lasting, incredibly versatile, and they come in hundreds of colors from a big handful of sources. Not only that, they are easy!
Even more importantly to me, as a batik artist, is the fact that these dyes do not need heat. If I needed to heat my dyes, it would melt my wax. Fiber reactive dyes make batiking possible for me.
I also love that I can use the same jars of dye powder for all of the dye techniques we utilize here at WAXON and teach in our classes: Shibori, LWI, tie-dye, batik, and ice dye. Same dyes, wildly different results. They’re amazing!
Negatives of Using Fiber Reactive Dyeing
None of these are really negatives to me… but they are some of the reasons I hear folks state when they decide not to use FRDs. I always ask, when folks come to me with a failed RIT project, why they didn’t just use fiber reactive dyes. Here are some reasons.
First of all, using protection. It is good practice to use a dust mask when mixing or handling dry dye powders and soda ash powder, as well as gloves. So if you’re not into masks, these probably aren’t for you!
That being said, in my careless younger years, I couldn’t be bothered to mask up, and I haven’t gotten lung cancer… yet?? Even though masking up is easy and a good idea, it does make some people anxious that the chemicals are bad for them. To which I reply, “well, only if you don’t wear a mask. And you’d have to do it a lot!”
If you’re looking for the most natural dyes on the market, this ain’t them. Fiber reactive dyes are not plant dyes. They are not made from plants in any sort of direct way.
Every now and then we do get customers coming in who are looking for plant dyes only, and they walk out empty-handed. It is totally okay to only want to use plant dyes!
I will caution, though, that the learning curve on plant dyes is much steeper, and results are not nearly as colorfast (read: they will fade, and fast). Those are the only two “downsides” to using fiber reactive dyes that I know of: they’re not the most natural dyes (but hardly the most toxic, far from it!) on the market, and you should use protection when handling them in dry powder form.
You can apply the fiber reactive dyeing process to a large variety of items, including cotton, and it’s something you can do yourself at home.
If you’re looking for pro-level dyes with a really easy-to-master learning curve, don’t have a ton of money or space, and want versatility, fiber reactive dyes are for you. They changed my craft life, and then my professional life, when I first started using them at 19 years old.
I’m now 40 (at the time of writing this) and my business is literally built on the trustworthiness of fiber reactive dyes. I can’t say enough great things about them.
