DIY: How to Bleach Dye Kona Cotton, a Tutorial

Every summer, I tie dye with my kids, but I have never tried bleaching fabric before. I put together a DIY tutorial and am sharing some results from my experiments with bleach dye and Kona cotton.

Some years we tie dye shirts and socks. This summer we decided to tie dye Kona PFD (prepared for dying) fat quarters, and I used them to make some masks.

It turns out, bleaching solid fabrics might be better than tie dye, because of the unpredictability of the fabric. This reverse tie dye (subtracting color instead of adding it) is so easy to do, and can basically be done with whatever you have on hand.

Last week, I gathered up a ton of Kona Cotton large scraps, fat quarters, wide strips, etc., a gallon of bleach, gloves and rubber bands, and got to work bleach dying the Kona. I wanted this to be a project that used only things I had on hand, so the bleach is Target brand (and color safe), and I didn’t trim the Kona at all. I did pre-wash and iron everything before I got started.

DIY TUTORIAL

A few quick tips:

• EDITED TO ADD: a comment from Maureen: after a cold water rinse you add an additional rinse of half and half cold water/white vinegar to set the colors. That was what we did to set the colors and that also stops fstops the bleach from further wearing down of the fabric.

• pre-wash, dry, and iron your fabrics first (unless you want the wrinkles to add to the effect)

• wear old clothes, or a full coverage apron

• wear gloves

• use a squirt bottle—these are the ones I have to water my trickier plants, and I recommissioned one for this project

• I mostly used the “crumple” fold, but tried out several different fold methods. If you are looking for folding examples, try this.

• dye outside if you can, but don’t throw the bleach waste water on your favorite plants

• don’t forget to experiment—there isn’t a right and a wrong way to do things

• I placed my fabrics in disposable aluminum pans when I applied the bleach and also used them as containers to rinse out the bleach—I also used cardboard, and it reacted with the bleach and further changed the fabric’s color

• with regular tie dye, where you are adding colors, I’m always careful about only washing like colors in the washing machine at the end of the process—you can wash everything together at the end, since you are lifting color instead of adding color

I did all of my bleach dying in foil, disposable casserole size pans that I had laying around in my basement. It worked out really well.

MY RESULTS

I used the “random crumple” method with most of my dying, and I really liked how they turned out. Results immediately below.

Experiment with changing a single variable—here, the only difference is starting with wet vs. dry fabric. Also: I should have rinsed out the yellow almost immediately. It really reacted to the bleach.

If you are dying yellows, watch the dye process, and be willing to rinse them out sooner than you had planned. Know ahead of time whether you want an end result where the color is mostly lifted, or not, and then rinse the fabric out accordingly!

I learned quickly that 100% bleach and 10 minutes could leach out the color from almost every fabric. I think it would be so fun to dye a few yards of the same color, experimenting with all of the variables, and make a quilt out of it. Teal would be a agreat

Interestingly, not all of the fabric reacted to the bleach, even when I left it in solution longer than normal. I have no idea why that is—these are all different colors, and values, and none of them reacted very much.

Navy and black are so cool to dye—instead of turning white, they turn orange. (See the teal for a comparison).

Green is similar to navy—I was surprised that it bleached to teal! Note, again, how the 100% bleach solution + a longer time removed almost all of the color.

This fuchsia color is one of the only ones I tried that could really take the 100% bleach + 10 minutes and still be recognizable.

The darker teal/green reacted in such cool ways! I would definitely like to try evergreen, royal blue, and a few others and see what happens.