Okay, I have been wishing for a way to dilute my fiebings pro dye to extend the dye. It's kind of expensive if you are dying big pieces with full strength dye! And I don't really want it to be full strength anyways. So I've been lurking on this forum browsing threads about the topic of diluting dye. The only way I found was by using alcohol, but as many of us know, the more alcohol you apply to veg tan leather, the harder and drier it becomes. So that led me to experimentation mixing pro dye with water. Pro dye is not an oil based dye, per se, because the vehicle for the pigment is most definitely alcohol. However, the pigment itself IS oil based. Oil is soluble in alcohol, but not in water, as pretty much everyone knows. So if you mix a bit of Pro Dye with water, a lot of that pigment will separate out of the dye and sit on the surface. Then I remembered learning about emulsions and I looked up emulsifiers for oil and water. BORAX is the answer! If you mix pro dye into a solution of water and borax, a stable emulsion is born! That means that the oil will remain mixed with the water permanently--you don't have to shake it up after the oil pigment separates out.
I'm just so excited about this, I wanted to find someone else who would care about it (and could use it) to share it with! So, I hope someone gets something out of his post. It's my first post.
