Hair Extensions Forum

I've had success with cake dye and food coloring on un-dyed roving, but it's tricky and takes forever. Grape kool-aid was a catastrophe, it was the fugliest purple I've ever seen. I was wondering what types and brands work good to produce a lovely deep purple or royal purple? Has anybody used RIT dye in purple?

I've not had the best of luck with RIT dyes, they stink and bleed all over the place if they get wet at all.

Food-grade dyes shouldn't be tricky or take long at all... what methods have you tried?

Grape kool-aid is largely a blue-based purple, and if your wool is a "natural" color (any tone other than a nice pure white or cream) it will come out mucky and brown-ish.

Hey! I find getting a good purple with food dyes a nightmare, maybe something to do with mixing the blue and red pigments together (cos I can't get purple food colouring here), so I use Ashford wool dyes (but of course ) which are weak acid dyes that only need vinegar as a fixative. Some more info is here http://www.ashford.co.nz/newsite/site-pages/dye-gallery You do need to have good ventilation when you're using them, and a special dyeing pot that you don't use for food, but appart from that, it's not really much more of a hassle than using food dyes
I've found that straight purple dyes tend to be a bit more of a warm, red-based violet, so for a really royal purple I use about 1/3 blue and 2/3 purple.
Hope that helps!

I get fabric dye from http://www.dharmatrading.com/ They have FAQs on what is the best dye for what fiber, and their fiber reactive dyes are amazing for silk & wool. So many colors to choose from. Also the fiber reactive dyes will not fade or wash out like RIT and most other dyes because the colour gets locked into the fiber. It's a bit of a chemistry experiment but they have instructions & it's totally worth the trouble. Also their customer service is excellent.