Dying clothes

I'll never forget my surprise at seeing bright fuchsia leak out of a washing machine at the local laundromat the year I was a student in Montpellier. I later learned that the reason the water in the machine was like that was that the girl was dying some clothes.

Fast forward 6 years, and I have a pair of capris and gym pants that are no longer black but dark gray. I bought a replacement pair of capris, but before I could take the old ones to Emmaüs, someone suggested I dye them.

Looking into the dying-by-washing-machine process, I was a little nervous about accidentally dying the subsequent loads of laundry, but I finally bit the bullet and did here. Here's my photo story of the process!

First, here are the pants I wanted to dye, lain vertically. Horizontally is a pair of new black leggings, to show the difference in color with the washed out black.

This is the dye product I used. They make two different kinds of dyes based on the fabric you want to dye. They sell two different sizes because the amount of dye you need is based on the weight of the clothes when dry (tip: weigh your clothes before so you know how much dye you need!). I bought the small box, which technically was a little short for 2 pairs of cotton pants.
Inside you have a package of dye, a package of chemical fixer, and detailed instructions.
Here is a close-up of the chemical fixer. It basically looked like powder laundry soap. The dotted line shows where you're supposed to slit open the container.

Here is the dye and the fixer (with a slit cut in each container) placed in my washer.

This is the two containers covered in 500g of salt. You actually have to add salt to make the whole thing work, so don't forget to buy a discount bag if you want to dye some clothes.

These are my wet clothes placed on top, just before starting the cycle. You have to thoroughly wet your clothes before you start, even though you run the machine like a normal laundry cycle.

Here's mid-cycle. If you look closely, you can see the black water running down the back of the drum. My machine sudsed up a bit, but I don't know if that was due to residual detergent or the dye products.

At the end of the 40° cycle. Notice the black on the rubber lining of the machine. After the dye cycle, you take out the plastic containers (now empty) and do a regular cycle with detergent.


I forgot to take a picture of my machine after I cleaned it with a bleach kitchen product, but the rubber liner looked much better.


This is the final result:
I haven't yet worn or washed these items, so I can't yet report on how well the dye holds up once they're re-washed.

Some things to keep in mind:

I was really stressed about washing clothes after the dye cycle, but the problem is not exactly that you're clothes will come out black (or gray). The dye is actually tiny flakes, and it deposited in my machine looking like fish food. When I cleaned off the rubber liner, is came off in clumps. The instructions recommend you wash rags/towels afterward, possibly with bleach, which is what I did. The first few loads I did afterwards had a number of black flakes sticking to the towels/clothes. Mostly these shake off or can be pulled off, but I'm not sure if my cotton-modal mix dress picked up the dye or if it's something else (several dark sticky spots on the dress).

I would strongly suggest doing a bleach heavy load with your mop cloth (or similar) right after a dye job, and then to do several towel/bathmat/sheet loads. That way it's fairly easy to see if any dye flakes have stuck to your laundry, it's easy to get them off, and if for some reason they stick it's not the shirt you need for work.

While I don't think I'll be dying more clothes real soon, I think it could be a good solution to make bath towels with bleached spots look new.