Someone already used my pun (Dylon Cold Water Dye) (Dylon Dye)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Dylon Dye
Date:	09/09/01 (3336 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Worked well eventually

Disadvantages: Costly, Instructions are a bit haphazard

Once again there is no absolutely accurate category so this is going here. This sia review of Dylon in general and their COLD WATER dyes. Sorry.

I bought a large cotton hooded top a few years ago. You know the type of garment that says: 'Wash by hand separately in water that is as cold as ice, don't iron or even warm it up and if anything ever bad happens to it then it's your fault not ours.' It was a kind of organic red if you know what I mean, the type of colour that says- this top was made in a cool hippy way and not the typical industrial exploitation of Indian workers type way that you had in mind. I bought the top in Glastonbury- I'm sure someone somewhere on this site has reviewed Glastonbury, anyway for a bit of a brief intro to Glastonbury it's a place which attracts people who want to be weird. There's a representative from every cult on earth and a few from elsewhere and it's a place to be hip(py). I have nothing against real hippies, or those most people would call weird but people who want to be weird and try to be odd, oh dear it's a shame. Well anyway this top is kind of hippy, I liked it and bought it.

After wearing it a few times, I don't know how many, I decided that it was time to risk the inevitable and wash the top. I'd finally gone too far and the balance had tipped. You know how it is you try to keep the top quite clean and you ignore the slightly musty smell as you don't want to risk shrinkage or fading of a favourite piece of clothing. Well I thought to get it clean will require some detergent and so I went on a hunt for a cotton friendly, colour locking, anti shrinking cold water effective detergent. When I'd decided on Persil non bio or whatever it was I got a bucket of cold water and immersed my garment. Lots of dye came out. My mother told me not to worry (and being a worldly wise lady (my mum not me) I of course listened to her) it was probably only excess dye and j
ust carry on and wash the top and be cool. So I was cool, washed the top and ignored the fact that it was bleeding profusely into the oh so cold water.

Well I hung my dripping wet top on the washing line in the garden and left it in the rare sunlight in the glorious summer of the south west of England. OK, OK I'm a student and I'm a little lazy but with a busy life style I forgot about my top and it stayed out for maybe a few days longer than it should have -that being one. Anyway when I pulled it in off the line it had bleached a little, more down the centre where it had been over the line and less elsewhere so there was an interesting pink fading to natural fibre effect. Now I'm secure in my masculinity, I have nothing against wearing pink (apart from pink shirts which just make people look like they're trying to look rich) but this top had this interesting fading effect and thus it was not wearable. OK I told myself I'll dye it. Dark green I thought, I'll dye it dark green. Two reasons, one the darker colour will go over the faded stuff and also Dark stuff goes with anything.

That was about three years ago, I may be exaggerating a little here. About last week I actually bought some Dylon Pre Dye, stuff you put into water to take the colour out. I had only one pot of it and used that. It worked like a charm, even though I was supposed to use warm water and I used cold, also to avoid shrinkage, and the colour fled from the fibre like the Israelites from Egypt. I then left it to dry in the sun hoping the ultra violet would work it's magic. And so it did. My top went a bad pink/natural fibre cross and looked, if anything, worse than it had before. When I then bought more pre dye and tried the same again very little happened. Although I was doing something not suggested on the label I thought more might happen than this, but no. So if you use Dylon pre dye use it all in one sitting. Each small tub costs about £1.65 and is
supposed to be effective on four ounces of material. I think my top is nearly three times that but also think much of the bleaching effect was due to the sunlight.

I bought three tubs of dye, two black and one green. The black dye is supposed to be half as effective as the coloured ones and so I thought this would work as a balance. Thus I had enough dye to dye 8ounces of material. There are some small packets of fix you buy to set the colour into the material. Dylon do a free leaflet with their dyes that gives you instructions on how to use their different products. I plumped for Dylon Cold Dye as I thought that would be the best to use for my top. The leaflet says to use salt to fix your colour into your garment. OK I thought I've bought my packets of salt and my dye lets go. So I opened dye pack one and read the instructions. The dye comes in tubs about as round as an old ten pence piece and about a centimetre deep. The tops are metal and are folded around the rim of the plastic container. Underneath this is a fold up list of instructions packed into the bundle by wrapping the whole lot in plastic. This costs you about £1.65. So I looked at my instructions and it said to wash your top, in a machine, with detergent. So we scanned the washing machine handbook looking for a wash that was in cold water. No luck there. The only option was to use a rinse cycle, all cold water, and apply the detergent onto the top directly. No problems, this worked really well.

The instructions say fill a container with enough cold water to easily cover your garment. I used a stainless steel sink as this isn't supposed to stain (doh!). Then you mix your dye in a separate container with a pint of hottest tap water. Pierce the top of the dye container with a knife. Oh good, that shoots a mini mushroom cloud of dye everywhere. Don't do this unless you are outside, in fact don't do this, the best way is to squeeze the plastic container and the metal lid w
ill lever off. It doesn't say whether to use a pint per tub or a pint overall. Having done it I think it's a pint overall but don't sue me if this doesn't work for you. Then it says to dissolve the fix into hottest tap water, no amount specified this time, with four ounces of salt. One packet of fix and four ounces of salt per tub of dye. Now when I read this I realised it meant table salt, not the fix salt in the packet. Not made at all clear on the free instructions Dylon provide as an advertising leaflet. By this point, because I was following the instructions step by step like a good boy, I had already put the dye in hot water. We didn't have a pound of salt at home funnily enough. So I blagged a lift to buy some salt. You get funny looks buying two large containers of salt from a 24 hour store at about 7pm I can tell you. Anyway salt doesn't exactly cost much so I wasn't objecting too badly. Having misread the instructions I added the large amount of salt and fix to the water the dye was dissolved in, now much colder than hottest tap water as we'd rushed out to buy salt. Well I thought I'll pour some boiling water over it and stir until it dissolves. This worked too.

Pour your dissolved dye and salt/fix mixture into the cold water in the dye receptacle and then immerse your damp garment in it. Easy. At this point everything looked pitch black. Oh well, a black top is cool too, and as it fades it'll go green. Agitate every now and then for about ten minutes and keep lifting it out and putting it back to prevent folds forming. I did this, with gloves which split as I have big hands. I gave up and used my bare hand which dyed a dark greenish colour, MMMMM. Well after dunking it about for about three hours (on and off obviously) I then pulled the plug and rinsed the top until the water ran clean. This took me about an hour, no seriously, what with stopping for needing the loo. What is that about? run cold water over
hands and soon enough toilet time? Huh? Well the top was now looking a gorgeous dark green colour, not the pitch black I'd been convinced of earlier and all in all I think it a good thing. After rinsing for so long I had wrinkly hands I put the top in the washing machine for another cold wash.

That was last night. The top is now hanging on the line looking quite good. Not so good as it did wet but that's just life. On close inspection it looks like it is dark green dyed over reddy brown but only from close up so I'll get away with it. Overall I am quite pleased with the result. The trouble is if I total up the cost:

Three tubs of Pre Dye @ £1.65 => £4.95
Three tubs of Dye @ £1.65 => £4.95
Three sachets of fix @ £0.45 => £1.35
Two 350g tubs of table salt @ £0.35 => £0.70

Total cost => £11.95

Ouch! More than a tenner to dye my top. That's nearly as much as it cost in the first place. So overall the dye worked fine but it was quite costly. Also the instructions that Dylon provide for free are next to useless apart from for estimating how much dye to use. I think I slightly overestimated the weight of my top but better that way around than the other. If dyeing something black I would suggest that you place a very small amount of coloured dye in too to give the black some depth. I would also suggest you see if you can find some larger tubs of dye for a better value. If I dye anything again I will look for alternatives before turning to Dylon.

Summary: