🎨 Dye Recipe Calculator
Enter your fabric weight, depth of shade, and liquor ratio to get a ready-to-weigh fibre-reactive recipe — dye, water, salt, and soda ash, all dosed for your batch.
🎨 Your Bath, Weighed Out
What is a Dye Recipe Calculator?
The depth-of-shade method is how professional dyers get repeatable colour: dye is weighed as a percentage of the fibre, and the auxiliaries are dosed against the bath. This calculator does that arithmetic for you, turning a fabric weight, a shade percentage, and a liquor ratio into grams of dye, millilitres of water, and grams of salt and soda ash — a recipe you can take straight to the scale.
Use it to scale a swatch up to a full piece, reproduce a shade batch after batch, or plan the auxiliaries for an immersion dye bath. The results are estimates for planning; test on a sample swatch first, since fibre, water, and temperature all nudge the final colour.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How does the depth-of-shade dye recipe work?
Depth of shade is the dye weight as a percentage of the fabric weight, so 100 g of fabric at a 2% shade needs 2 g of dye. Water comes from the liquor ratio — 100 g at 20:1 means 2000 ml of bath. Salt and soda ash are dosed per litre of that bath, defaulting to 50 g/L of salt and 20 g/L of soda ash, which for a 2 L bath works out to 100 g of salt and 40 g of soda ash.
What do salt and soda ash do in a fibre-reactive dye bath?
Salt drives the dye out of solution and onto the fibre, improving exhaustion and colour yield, while soda ash raises the pH to fix the dye by bonding it to the cellulose. Heavier shades generally want more salt, and the soda ash is usually added partway through once the dye has had time to level. Adjust the g/L fields to match your dye manufacturer's instructions.
Will the recipe give me the exact colour I want?
These are estimates for planning; test on a sample swatch first. Fibre type, water hardness, temperature, and dye batch all shift the final colour, so dial in the shade percentage on a small swatch, record what worked, then scale the recipe up to your full piece.