Name: elaine
Message: I have a jacket and pants I want to dye.  The jacket is 94% polyester and 6% spandex that says machine wash cold and the pants are 62% polyester, 35% rayon and 3% spandex.  Can I dye these and if so do I treat them just like dying polyester material.

No, you cannot. Dyeing polyester requires that you boil the fabric in disperse type dye for an hour. However, your garments contain spandex as well. Spandex is extremely heat-sensitive and will be damaged by even one minute of boiling.

Polyester/spandex garments are essentially undyeable. The only option for changing the color of your garments is pigment dyeing, which is actually not dyeing at all, but instead applying fabric paint. See "Fabric Paints: a different way to color fibers". Consider Dharma Pigment dyes, which are supposed to work on polyester.

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