Especially if you are new, you may be wondering exactly what goes into the process of making a tie-dye shirt.
You probably have read all kinds of different instructions and it is unclear to you what tools you need to use.
One thing you certainly don’t need is vinegar, it won’t help set your dye or make your colors brighter.
Do You Need Vinegar for Tie-dye?
No, vinegar is not needed for tie-dye. We do not normally use vinegar in the tie-dye process.
In fact, it might even be detrimental to use vinegar. To set the dye you actually need soda ash to make the solution alkaline. Vinegar, which is acid, would actually be harmful to the process.
Does Vinegar Help Set Tie-dye?
No, vinegar does not help set tie-dye done on cotton or other plant fibers.
For the dye to work with cotton we need to create a basic (alkaline) environment and vinegar would ruin that.
If you are planning on tie-dyeing a regular shirt, I would suggest staying away from vinegar.
When do You Need Vinegar?
The more complicated answer is that there is a use for acidic products like vinegar, but it is a very specialized use.
The only time where you would want to use acidic products is if you are trying to dye wool or other protein fibers. Even then, vinegar isn’t the preferred option because it has disadvantages over other chemicals.
Is Vinegar Used to Dye Wool?
If you are trying to dye protein fibers like wool then you should use a slightly different process than normal tie-dyeing.
Fibers made from animal proteins are quite than, let’s say, cotton. For protein fibers you need to introduce an acidic product to enable the reaction between the dye and the proteins.
If you want to dye wool you probably are thinking about using vinegar to activate the dye. If you are familiar with vinegar you will know that it smell quite strongly and it can be unpleasant.
For this reason and others, we prefer using citric acid whenever when want to reduce the pH of a solution. For dyeing wool you need to lower the pH quite a bit and you would need a lot of vinegar, which isn’t ideal. Vinegar is a weak acid and we prefer using citric acid which is stronger and doesn’t smell.
Citric acid is a safe chemical that comes from citrus plants, it has the benefit of being odorless and is more potent than vinegar so you need to use less of it to make the water acidic.
Tie-dye artists do not commonly have a use for acidic chemicals. The only real uses are for dyeing wool and to experiment with the dye reaction. If this is the case, we recommend using citric acid, but keep in mind that it isn’t standard in kits. Luckily it is really cheap to buy in large quantity if need be.
How can pH Affect the Tie-dye Process?
You can experiment with stopping or altering the reaction between fiber-reactive dyes and plant fibers.
Natural plant-based fibers need an alkaline (basic) environment in order to react with dyes. This is accomplished by introducing soda ash, a basic chemical product.