Can i use silk dye on cotton?

Question

what will happen if i use jacquard silk dye on a shirt thats 50% cotton 50% polyester? i just bought a bunch of dyes and didnt realize they were for silk.

Answer 1

Jacquard Green Label Silk Colors cannot be used on cotton. They have an acid added, which is useful for dyeing silk, but which prevents the dye from reacting with cotton. They won't work at all. Save them for later, when you have 100% real silk to dye. Plain white dyeable silk scarves are very inexpensive if you buy from a dye supplier.

Jacquard Red Label Silk Colors contain the same dyes, at twice the strength, but without the acid, so they work fine on cotton if you use at least one tablespoon of dye per shirt, or two tablespoons for dark colors, and also use either soda ash or trisodium phosphate (TSP) to activate the dye for cotton. Cotton requires a high pH to accept dye.

No silk dyes will work on polyester, though. If you try to dye a fifty percent cotton/fifty percent polyester shirt, you can get at most a pale pastel color, because the fifty percent of the fiber that is polyester will not take any sort of silk dye, no matter what chemicals you use it with. Always buy 100 percent natural fibers, cotton, silk, rayon, or linen, if you want to dye them. For a wide range of inexpensive dyeable white clothing, see Dharma Trading Company.

The best dye for cotton is Procion MX dye. The only dye for polyester is disperse dye. There is no single dye that can dye both cotton and polyester. However, you can use a new dye by Jacquard Products called "iDye Poly" to dye polyester, because it contains disperse dye. To use this dye, you must boil the shirt in the dye for half an hour. Never reuse a dyeing pot for food, because all clothing dye (including Rit) will contaminate food. You can use Procion MX dye at room temperature to dye cotton without ruining a cooking pot, but most other dyes require boiling and therefore require you to invest in a dyeing pot.

Answer 2

Dyeing polyester blends can be tricky.

You might try going to the Jacquard forum and asking there.

http://www.jacquardproducts.com/forums.p...

Good luck!