Well, that isn't what I expected

Some days things just don't turn out the way you expect.  Both shirts were dyed in chocolate brown dye.  The pirate one is what I would expect.  The ninja one is a nice olive green.  The dye was from the same container.  I thought maybe the mixed up dye solution had sat too long, but I had a problem with the fuchsia not taking in batch of black and purple at the same time.  The black was a greenish gray and the purple was blue.  All looked good, but weren't what I was trying for.

The best guess I have is that it is related to the water softener and how long between recharging and dyeing.  We moved in April and there is hard water here.  The softener recharges based on the date rather than volume of water used.  But I'd dyed since we moved and it turned out so I didn't think much of it.

I think the next time I'm going to do a batch of shirts I'm going to have to either manually recharge the softener or order some add in softener.

Arrr

I should have posted this Monday, September 19th, since that is Talk Like a Pirate Day.  But sometimes I just don't quite get there.  Not that you have that problem, right? 

And it goes well with yesterday's post with the male priates.  Because women can be pirates also.

Pirate vs. Pirate

Sometimes, even when you use the same color dye it comes out differently. Both of these pirate shirts were dyed with black dye and were in one photo, I didn't modify the colors at all.

The one on the right has more of a purple cast to it. Black dye isn’t normally a ‘pure’ dye. It is made up of different colors of dye powder. So a weaker solution, or around the edges when tie-dyeing, won’t necessarily be gray. It might have a different color cast. Dharma describes the color cast each of their 4 black fiber reactive dyes has on the Description tab.

What can also happen is the color won’t be the same if the water used to dissolve the dye wasn’t warm enough. Some of the colors need hotter water to dissolve well. Fuchsia and turquoise both seem to dissolve better in warmer water. So some of one color’s particles might dissolve better than another color’s giving you something different than what you expected. That may not be a problem, it depends on what you want.