Reverse Geode Hoodie
I always love how reverse dyes look. I think the contrast between the dark black shirt/hoodie against the bright tie dye really is eye-catching. I also love the taupe color that I get on most black shirts/hoodies from using the Rit Color Remover. This hoodie has some of that color showing when it is completed and I really like it. Here is a link for the YouTube tutorial video for this hoodie.
Under my YouTube videos in the description part for the video, I usually put links to a lot of items that I use when I tie dye. I will also list the colors and links to the dye suppliers that I used on the item featured in the video.
I thought it would be fun to make a reverse dyed geode design. I really like making geode tie dyes. Most of the time I search the internet for photos of natural geodes for inspiration. Once I find one that has colors that I find eye-catching, I pull out my color swatches and begin finding similar dye colors. However, for this reverse dyed geode I thought I would just go with bright pinks and purples.
I started out by washing a Hanes Ultimate Cotton Heavyweight Hoodie in Dharma’s Textile Detergent to get out any of the chemicals that might be left in the garment from the manufacturing process. This hoodie is 90% cotton and 10% polyester. The higher the cotton content, the better the hoodie will take the dye and the more vibrant the color will be when we get to that part. Polyester hoodies and sweatshirts are very common, so make sure and check the fabric content before you begin dyeing. Procion fiber reactive dyes will only work on natural fabrics like cotton.
Then I started tying geodes while the hoodie was still damp. I like to try to make my geodes as random as possible, so I vary the amount of sinew lines I use, the width of the lines, and the size of the geodes. If you aren’t familiar with sinew, it is a many stranded thread that has been wax coated. When I tie a line with the sinew, I pull it tight which makes the sinew lock down on itself and form a barrier that won’t allow the dye, or in this case the dye remover, get under that line. Tight sinew lines are what cause the thin white lines in a tie dye design or black lines in a reverse dye. After the shirt is tied, I move on to the color removal process.
In the video, it had already gotten dark by the time I put the hoodie in the Rit Color Remover. Since you couldn’t see what I was doing, I =showed a video clip from the batch of shirts that I did just before it got dark to show the process that I use. I really like the Rit Color Remover, but it has a smell that reminds me of a perm from the 1980’s. It’s not horrible, but I don’t want my tie dye area to smell like that so I do the color removal process outside. I use a 3 gallon bucket that is made of thick plastic and I fill it with boiling hot water. For this hoodie, I added 2 boxes of Rit Color Remover powder to the water and stirred it to make sure all the powder was dissolved. Then I added the tied hoodie and used a spoon to make sure it was well submerged. I stirred it periodically and I made sure that the hoodie stayed under the color remover. All the areas where I put the sinew should remain black. Since I tied the geodes fairly tight, I expect a few areas inside each geode to also remain black. After 20 minutes or so, I removed the hoodie from the bucket and rinsed it before putting it in the washing machine to wash. I left it tied with the sinew and washed it in hot water along with a little bit of Dharma’s textile detergent. Leaving the hoodie tied works really well. Sometimes a bit of the sinew on the outside gets a little frayed, but if it has been pulled tight, it should be just fine.
Once the hoodie was washed, I put it into my soda ash solution to allow it to soak for 20-30 minutes. Then I put it (still tied) into my Panda spin dryer to wring out the excess soda ash. I want the hoodie to dry out completely before I begin applying the dye, so I will put it aside to let it dry. I got busy working on other projects and so this hoodie actually sat for almost a month. Needless to say, it was definitely dry.
We got a bunch of snow, and so I decided to pull several shirts that were ready to be dyed and snow dye them. Snow dyeing isn’t something that I get to do often because we don’t get much snow where I live - it will maybe snow only once or twice a season. This time it snowed 6.5 inches and so I had to take advantage of it.
I put the hoodie into a plastic dishpan that I purchased from the Dollar Store and began randomly adding the dye. I wanted to use pink and purple tones so I chose: cotton candy from Prochemical and Dye, plum from Dharma, purple #521 and wholesale pink from Custom Colours. I purchase dye (Procion Fiber Reactive Dye) from a variety of suppliers, the 4 most common ones that I use are Dharma Trading Company, Custom Colours, Gratefuly Dyes and Prochemical and Dye. I also added an additional sprinkle of dry soda ash over the top of the dye. I like to add the additional soda ash to make sure the ice or snow doesn’t wash all of the soda ash from the soak out of the hoodie when it melts and runs through the hoodie.
I put the container outside in the snow, but after a little while, I just piled a bunch of snow on top and brought it inside. I put the container in a spot out of the way where it wouldn’t get disturbed. When I “muck” dye, I put the item I am dyeing into a container and allow it to sit in the runoff from the melting ice/snow (the runoff is referred to as “muck”). I don’t want to disturb or move the container in any way or it could make unwanted dark areas on the shirt. It is particularly important not to disturb the “muck,” especially if you are using colors that would mix and make brown together on a shirt. I usually allow my items to process a minimum of 24 hours. This one ended up processing for about 48 hours. It is important to remember that to bond the Procion fiber reactive dye properly with the fabric, soda ash is necessary to raise the pH and heat is necessary too. So, I process my items in a room that is above 70 degrees Fahrenheit and I wait until the ice melts before I start the countdown to rinse out.
I start rinsing in cold water to remove the soda ash that is left in the hoodie. Once the soda ash is out of the item, the chances of colors transferring where I didn’t put them gets greatly reduced. The cold water rinse is important when you are trying to keep areas on your shirt white. Once I get the soda ash out of the shirt, the white areas usually won’t permanently stain even if some of the dye I’m rinsing comes in contact with that area. Then I like to gradually warm the water up to hot to flush out the dye that didn’t react with the hoodie. For a thick item like this, I like to do a hot water soak. It would take a long time and a lot of water to rinse until the water turned clear. So, I added some hot water to the sink along with a small squirt of Blue Dawn dish soap and put the hoodie in to soak. Blue Dawn dish soap is pH neutral and will help keep any of the dye that is rinsed or soaked out of the hoodie from redepositing back onto the hoodie during the soak. After the water in the sink cools off, I will drain it and repeat the soaking process until the water is almost clear. I think that rinsing is an important step to avoid the tie dyed item from bleeding each time it is washed in the washing machine. Some colors have a tendency to bleed worse than others, so I still suggest washing an item alone for the first couple of washings. Then I put the hoodie into the washer and washed in hot water and a little bit of Dharma’s Textile Detergent. Since I usually dye quite a few items at a time, I will put multiple items into the washing machine at the same time. That isn’t a problem if they’ve been rinsed well and if I am using a product like Dharma’s Textile Detergent which helps keep the dye from redepositing onto the shirts.
The last step is to put the hoodie in the dryer!