Name: Barry Ulrich
email: jbulrich2000@yahoo.com
Message: I bought what I thought was jockey red sunbrella for use on my boat and it faded out in 6 months instead of the usual 7 years. It was fake. I spent many hours installing hundreds of grommets and would like your advice as to what I could use to dye this material, even if it only lasts a couple of years. I am willing to redo every couple years.

Dyeing acrylic fabric is not a good project for the dye novice. Ordinary dyes will not stick to acrylic fabric, so a rather toxic and hard-to-find kind of dye called basic dye has to be used, and I do not recommend that non-professionals make use of these dyes. See "Dyeing Acrylic with Basic Dye". I think that you will need to use a good fabric paint, instead.

Acrylic can also be dyed with disperse dyes, the dyes that are used for dyeing polyester. (See "Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes".) This requires that you acquire an immense non-aluminum cooking pot for dyeing the fabric in, since the dyeing container must be large enough for the fabric to move freely in the dyebath. You should not reuse a dyeing pot for cooking food, so this represents a very large investment for people who dye fabric only occasionally. An additional problem is that you cannot produce deep or bright colors on acrylic with disperse dye. Disperse dye is not the answer to your problem.

Sunbrella® brand acrylic fabric is light-resistant due to the dyeing method, which involves adding the color to the liquid plastic before the fiber is created. It seems likely that they use pigments, rather than true dyes, as this would greatly increase the light resistance of the color. The dyes used on acrylic fibers are notorious for their sensitivity to light, though they are far less light-sensitive when used on acrylic than when used on natural fiber such as wool.

The only remaining alternative, short of buying new fabric, is to use fabric paint to paint your acrylic fabric. Do not use ordinary housepaint or artists' acrylic paints without amendment, as they will tend to peel off of the fabric. You need to either buy a good quality fabric paint, or you need to add a special fabric medium to artists' acrylic paint. You can buy Liquitex Acrylic Fabric Medium or Golden Acrylic Fabric Medium at an art supply store, though you may need to use mail order to find it. Blick Art Materials is one source for both of these brands of fabric medium. If you buy good fabric paint, you will want to find a source that supplies fabric paint in large one-quart jars, not the expensive little two-ounce jars found at the local art supply store. Dharma Trading Company is a good mail-order source for larger jars of high quality fabric paint.

Please look at Scarlet Zebra's Instructions for Painting Upholstered Furniture, on my site, to get an idea of what using fabric paint to cover large areas is like. You will need a large amount of fabric paint, depending on how large your acrylic canvas is. Your project is a more sensible one than painting upholstered fabric, since you can hang your fabric up to dry, but otherwise it will be rather similar.

Fabric paint will not produce a perfectly smooth solid color, as industrial machine dyeing will do, but it will probably help you to improve the appearance of your boat's fabric without wasting all of the hours of work you've done already, installing hundreds of grommets.