dye job

I bought this dress in Vegas last spring, and even though I loved it when I bought it, that’s the only time I’ve ever worn it. I realized after wearing it the first time that I absolutely hated the long lacy sleeve on one side, and that while the dress was gorgeous, the nude part under the lace was actually a lot lighter than my skin tone, which made the dress extremely unflattering on me, kind of like I was just wearing Spanx with lace stapled on top.

I viciously hacked off the sleeve one night, and even bought some light brown dye to try to dye the under-fabric, but sadly it is made of polyester which is apparently the only fabric in the world that can’t be dyed, and it looked exactly the same afterwards.

I accepted my failure and the dress had just been sitting in my closet for about 6 months, but last week for some reason I remembered it, and refusing to accept defeat, turned to Google for answers.

There were a bunch of kind of scary tips involving gas masks and goggles for dying polyester, usually in random out of the way “WikiAnswer” type message boards, but I decided to try one of them. It’s not like I am wearing it the way it is now anyway, so if it doesn’t work, what have I lost?

I bought a spray bottle, some Camel coloured dye, some rubbing alcohol and some gloves and set to work.

I had originally planned on using the spray bottle to saturate the dress with the alcohol/dye mixture, but I got sick of that after about 2 minutes (patience isn’t my strong suit) and ended up pouring the whole thing into a plastic garbage bag with the dress, and rubbing it around to get the colour on it.

According to the instructions, you use rubbing alcohol because it evaporates a lot faster than water, then you iron it on a really hot setting to get the dye to absorb into the fibers, then you rinse it quickly in the coldest water you can find, and once it dries you are good to go.