An offer to dye for

Viscose/linen blends, as it turns out, are usually quite expensive. Unless you want white. Minerva has some white deadstock viscose/linen going at about half the price of the colours, and over the weekend they had a sale on white fabric, so it was still further reduced; and this is where dyeing becomes extremely economic.

I'm not short of relevant experience. For most of my life I had a good deal more style than money, which meant that if I either wanted a new look or found something that was incredibly good value but the wrong colour, dyeing was a good option. Also, there were things that simply weren't available in the colours I wanted. For quite a few years I wore nylons (I really can't be bothered with them now, except for popsocks in the summer, which I wear only so that my feet don't stick to my khussa shoes), and I used to get those very cheaply through a company which delivered them regularly on a subscription basis... which makes sense if you wear the things, because they're always going through. So I'd get the lightest colours they could supply, and then I'd dye them to go with my outfits, which at the time primarily meant reds, greens, and purples.

For a very long time, if you wanted to dye anything, what you bought was Dylon. This came in several varieties; you could get a cardboard box with a paper packet inside it, which went in your machine (the contents, obviously, not the packet), and you added a generous amount of salt on top of the dye to fix it. These cardboard boxes have now, for no reason I can fathom, been replaced by plastic containers known as "pods". I thought we were supposed to be replacing plastic with biodegradables as far as possible, not the other way round. Alternatively, there were the hand dyes, one of which was suitable for natural fibres only, while the other one would do certain synthetics (it did nylon extremely well, but it wouldn't do polyester - not very much will). These came in little metal tins which were an absolute menace. You had to open them by cutting through the lid with a Stanley knife. I wish I was joking. Having damaged something on one of these tins (I think it was a rubber glove; it wasn't me, thankfully, or I'd probably have ended up in A&E, as I have dye allergies so I need to be extremely careful I don't get it on my skin), I actually wrote to Dylon to complain that their packaging was dangerous, and I got a rather off-hand letter in reply saying there wasn't a suitable alternative. Well, of course there was, because they eventually did change the packaging; it comes in sachets now. I strongly suspect I wasn't by any means the only person who complained about those awful little tins.

Dylon wasn't bad, and it certainly did me well for the nylons; but they had their limitations. They claimed you couldn't mix the powder dyes. In fact you could, and I did. I specifically wanted to match something to an existing item I had, so I did a bit of educated guessing and ended up with a perfect match; that was more good luck than good management, but I was pretty sure I'd at least get something close enough to tone nicely. They also had (and still do have) a rather limited colour range... and, of course, there were those tins. Not only that, but Dylon was never very cheap, and these days it's surprisingly expensive. The regular going price for one of those machine-dye "pods" is about £10, though I've seen everything from £7 (Dunelm, if you're interested - you're welcome!) to over £16. I'm not sure about the hand dyes.

So when I was thinking about dyeing garb and concluding that Dylon just didn't have anything I liked that would work in the context, I suddenly remembered that there is an alternative. There is Rit. Rit dyes are American, but surprisingly still a lot cheaper than Dylon (well, it does depend where you get them, but Minerva do them quite cheaply). If you go and look at their own website you will find that they do a huge range. It's the sort of colour range you normally associate with something like emulsion paint. Not only that, but they positively encourage you to mix their dyes, so if you can specify a hex code for it, you can dye something exactly that colour. I'm enormously impressed. Obviously you can't get the entire range over here, but you can get a selection that is good enough for most purposes, including SCA garb. They do both liquid and powder dyes, and I think their synthetics version does actually dye polyester (I have made a mental note to try that at some point just to prove it). The liquid dye is said to be washing-machine-friendly, but given that what I have is a washer-dryer and it has a few little quirks I've never encountered with a standard washing machine, I think I'd prefer to dye by hand. Fortunately, the instructions for that are available online.

So I ordered the liquid dye and read the instructions carefully. You need three gallons of hot water. Oh, yes. They're American. Of course it's in gallons. I typed "convert gallons to litres" into my favourite search engine and got a figure somewhere between 13.5 and 14, so I thought, fine, I need a 15-litre bucket. One of those (galvanised) is arriving tomorrow; I suspect it'll see a fair bit of use as a dye bath. Then I remembered that US gallons aren't the same as ours, and panicked for about a nanosecond before I also remembered that they're smaller, not bigger, so it doesn't matter.

And, of course, once you have a 15-litre bucket, you can also do ombre. You can do tie-dyeing (and I already have boatloads of jute twine for the netting). You can do batik. Maybe I'll even learn how to do the fancy yarn-dyeing that Adelle at Vegan Yarns does, and that I admire so much!

It's a dangerous thing to go offering white fabric at less than half the price of the colours. You don't know what you might spark off. 😁