Dye recipe

Dress 18, 41 and 8 could all have been printed using the following dye recipe.
Each production factory would have had its own recipes, closely guarded trade secrets the same as today, each claiming to be better, cheaper, more reliable, to help attract clients to use one factory over another.

All the recipes given below are made up to 1000g, divisions of which can be made by dividing the amounts as required.

When you buy any of the ingredients for these recipes, you must following the health and safely guidelines laid down by the manufacture and supplier to insure a safe working environment and practise for yourself and others.

If you are at all unsure about safe handling of any of the chemicals then there are many excellent books currently available which detail more exactly the handling and use of all the chemicals and dyestuffs.

When calculating how much print paste to make up, you need to know the amount of fabric to be printed which would less for dress 18 than 41 for example.

You need to take into account the fabric type; again, dress 18 would absorb more dyestuff than dress 41.

And also the amount of coverage that each colour within the design has, so for example the blue background of dress 18 will need more print paste mixing up than the black detail sections.

Direct dye print paste recipe.

10 -20 g dye colour powder ( this can be made up of more than one colour to achieve the required colour and the variation of amount depends on the density of colour required, transparent colours requiring less than strong colours.)

You can increase the amount of colour up to 50g but any excessive dyestuff printed onto the fabric will not fix very well and can cause problems when washing off after steaming.
These dye colour powders are mixed with 50 g urea which has been dissolved into 350ml of hot, perhaps boiling water.

Stir thoroughly to insure that all of the dye colour powder is fully dissolved, you may need to strain the solution to achieve this. Allow to cool before using.
This coloured solution is added to 565 g of sodium alginate thickener and mixed thoroughly.

Finally add 15g of disodium hydrogen phosphate and again stir thoroughly to mix.

You need to make up each colour required in this manner and then print and then fix onto the fibres through a saturated steaming method for 45 – 60 minutes and then wash out carefully.