Frustrations of a Tie Dye Newbie

Yesterday I did an experiment, making a Galaxy Swirl a few times, changing a few parts of the process.  None of them turned out the way I wanted them too.  ...sad face...

What bothers me the most is how muted they are, unless you're going for that... So I've ordered some dye thickeners and I'm going to read up about how to make the dyes more concentrated for squeeze bottles.  Plus I might do some dip dye today, which might be more satisfying.

First, I wanted to see if you can reuse dye a week later, so these first two shirts are from last week's dye:

Also both of these use a combination of Rit dyes and Tulip dyes (in the center).  Tulip dyes are made for cold temperature in a squeeze bottle, so that's why they work better!

 

These are from new dye and these also both used soda ash, which I just got for the first time:

The problem with this one is I ran out of blue... 

P.S. 

Uh Oh, the problem with RIT dye