Bukkit

Crouch and right click a chest while holding the appropriate dye causes the entire chest to be batch-varnished.

Since it is established in the crafting table that only 8 items may be varnished per unit, this should consume at the same rate. Naturally, an entire item stack will need to be varnished at a time.

There are 54 slots in a chest, and up to 64 items stacked in each slot, with 8 items stacked per unit of dye, this requires a maximum of 54 x 8 or 432 units of dye to do a complete job.  It should remove as many as are available in inventory when using a batch varnish.