How to Tie-Dye
Hello, and Welcome! to Father Barleywine's Tie-Dye Primer.
I'm putting this out on the Web because most of the material I've seen on tie-dyeing is very basic and unimaginative. More importantly, it really doesn't lead you to professional or fine-art results. There are a number of fine reference books on tie-dyeing, but the association of tie-dyeing with Hippies and the Grateful Dead (and the stereotypes of their lifestyle choices) means that these books are either out of print, hard to find, or focused on tie-dyeing at the level you'd seek for your kid's party. Not to say that Hippies, the Grateful Dead, and kid's parties are not worthy pursuits, but at least in America tie-dye has lost much of whatever fine art association it once had, as you can clearly see from the images on the Tie-Dye page on Wikipedia. But before we get into how to do it, let's examine the history of the technique briefly:
A Very Brief History of Tie-Dyeing
The perishable nature of fabric precludes us from establishing when tie-dye and other resist techniques such as batik were first practiced, but it is clearly an ancient art practiced by all early civilizations. It's simplicity and attractiveness undoubtedly led to it's independent discovery many times throughout history. Most of these techniques are still in practice, largely unchanged, to the present day, including the Japanese art of shibori, Indian bandani, bandhni, or bandhej, Malay-Indonesian plangi, and various African techniques, indigo dyeing being a particular favorite in Africa.
Here are a few good links for tie-dye history:
Dr. Paula Burch's tie-dye history page
Julie Jennings' tie-dye history page - a tie-dye vendor's page
Bandhani by the Kutchi people of Western India
Very nice on the techniques of Indonesia
I'll be adding more as I scout the web, it's already been a fascinating journey (though, like most of the web, the ocean of information is broad but rather shallow).
These techniques are almost entirely tie dyeing, as they use fine string, thread, or the like to bind fabric to resist the entry of dye into the cloth. This binding is typically in the form of regular repeats, often in mind-numbingly large numbers and finger-grindly close spacing, small size, and fineness. This is illustrated nicely on the Wikipedia Bandhani web page, particularly the purple print. Sometimes seeds, stones, or other small items are placed behind the fabric, pinched from the other side, and thread is wrapped around the fabric just behind the object. In tritik, the fabric is sewn with broad stiches and the tread drawn tight to form tightly packed pleats, typically leaving behind needle holes in the fabric and a pleasing linear resist that can be used to render shapes. A nice example is on the Texton Textiles site. Shibori encompasses all these techniques and more, including pleating fabric and binding it and wrapping the fabric around a tapered pole before tieing. Shibori also reflects the meticulous attention to detail characteristic of the Japanese people, in some cases to the extent that you have to shudder in appreciation of the eye, finger, and back strain involved. Shibori is also a great introduction to, and continuing part of, modern tie-dye.
Some words on modern tie-dye
Modern tie-die includes the older techniques, but has extended far beyond them into new territories of technique and design. Part of this has been the near-collapse of traditional resist techniques due to the emergence of fabric printing that is the basis of most modern fabric design, but the rise of art tie-dye has also grown from the abstraction that has characterized much of fine art in the 20th century. While tie-dye can be used to render designs, and the bulk of commercially available tie-dyes are designed to make mushroom, guitar, heart, cross, peace sign, and similar motifs, the primary artistic power of the technique lies in abstract or geometric patterns. In fact, much of the pleasure of modern tie-dye lies in the unexpected: while it is important to plan a design's colors and color interactions and the use of techniques to yield balanced designs, unwrapping a tie-dye is always a discovery. Indeed, in my experience it is the unexpected that is most often the special spicethat turns a competent but pedestrian piece into a masterwork.
Modern tie-dye also uses many new methods for creating resists, and modern chemistry has given the tie-dyer a full-spectrum range of colors and multiple dye and discharge (bleaching) chemistries. The most common dyes used are fiber-reactive dyes, which react permanently with natural fiber fabrics once activated and are therefore colorfast. This is the same dye chemistry that is used commercially to dye most natural-fiber fabric. RIT brand dyes can also be used for tie-dye, but even with a mordant (a chemical used to assist dye retention) the color is still lost in washing over time. Also, unlike the fiber-reactive dyes which quickly lose their ability to color fabric after being activated, RIT dyes retain their coloring potential, thus leading to a once-common "pink underwear" phenomenon after washing tie-dyed clothes with whites. Vat dyes, which are an ancient class of dyes that include indigo, are now available in a spectrum of colors. Technically more demanding, vat dyes are insoluble in water unless reduced, which is accomplished by heating the dyes with a reducing agent (sodium formaldehyde solfoxylate, sodium hydrosulfite, or thiourea dioxide) in basic solution (sodium caustic potash or lye). Once reduced, the solution typically has a near-opposite color from the final, oxidized form that will appear on the cloth (indigo dye vats are yellow, while the final color is, well, indigo blue). The technical advantage is that vat dyes will discharge fiber-reactive dyes due to the bleaching action of the reducing agents used, and since the reducing agents move through the fabric faster than the dyes, a vat dye used over a resist on fabric already colored with fiber-reactive dyes will result in a halo between the vat-dyed area and the resist-protected fiber-reactive-dyed area.
But let's get to it. You can use the sidebar to navigate to techniques you are curious about, or proceed at an orderly fashion through my Primer. Enjoy, and don't be afraid to dye.