How to rinse tie dye

When to rinse

When your tie dyed or ice dyed item is done batching, you'll want to rinse out all of the excess dye. I usually wait 24 hours after applying the procion dye to rinse the shirt. There are ways to speed up batch time if you want to rinse early, but that usually requires heating the shirt to set the colors.

How long to rinse

I like to put the shirt in the sink and rinse until the water is running mostly clear. I might spend 10 minutes, rinsing each shirt, but it varies quite a bit, depending on each person's process for rinsing. Blue dye takes the longest to fully rinse out and you probably won't get it to completely expel all of the blue dye in your initial rinse. So it's OK if you end up putting it through your washing machine before you got all of the blue out of the water. Just make sure that you move the shirts promptly from the washing machine to the dryer the first few washes.

Water temperature

When you first start rinsing the shirt, you'll want to use cold water to help get the majority of the excess dye out of the shirt. Since heat is what sets the dye in the fibers, if you use hot water immediately, you risk muddying the colors of your shirt by setting the excess dye as it's running through. Using cold water initially also helps to wash away the soda ash, which is what causes the die to adhere to the fabric. As you rinse, the pH of the shirt is returning to normal.

Once the water is running clear, switch it over to hot. The hot water will help release more of the dye that didn't fully bond to the fibers. Since most of the soda, Ash has been rinsed out you don't have to worry as much about the hot water, making excess dye bond to your shirt in places that you don't want it to.

Detergent

A lot of tie-dyes like to use detergent to help rinse away the dye. It's usually called Synthropol and it is a textile detergent that helps carry away the excess dye molecules and keep them from depositing onto the fabric. In forums for tie-dye, a lot of people also share that they use Dawn dish soap in their rinsing process in place of the textile detergent.

Problems when rinsing

If you start rinsing and it seems like all of the color is washing out instead of staying in the shirt, this could be two things: Your shirt is either polyester which is a plastic fiber that can't be dyed with fiber reactive procion dye, or you didn't use soda ash to set the color in the fiber.

Some tie dyers, who are dyeing a lot of items at one time will throw a bunch of shirts into the washing machine together. This is fast and efficient, but if there's too much excess die in the washing machine, it can muddy the light areas of the shirts