Country: USA

Message: Hi, I just finished dyeing my pair of 100% cotton cargo pants from tan to black using Jacquard Procion MX Dye Jet Black. The pants became black, but all the stitching on the pants remained tan, the original color. Would you know why, and what I can do to correct it? (The company that sold the pants is Old Navy.) Thank you for your time.

This always happens when you dye store-bought cotton clothing. All commercial clothing, if it is not specifically claimed to be sewn together with cotton thread, is instead sewn with polyester. Since polyester cannot be dyed with any cotton dye, this means that the stitching always remains the original color, whenever you redye clothing.

The best solution is to buy clothing that is labeled PFD, which means "Prepared For Dyeing", or RTD, which means "Ready To Dye"; these two labels usually mean that the stitching at the seams is made with cotton thread, which will take any dye you use to change the color of the fabric. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find PFD or RTD clothing. I don't know of any source for PFD cargo pants or jeans. The best sources I know of for online retail sales of PFD and RTD clothing is Dharma Trading Company.

If the thread is unwaxed and not treated with any sort of finish, then it is possible to dye it with polyester dye, or cover it with a fabric paint that works on polyester. However, this is a lot of trouble, almost invariably more trouble than it's worth. It's usually better to learn to love the contrasting color of the stitching.

I've tried using fabric markers to color in the thread, but gave it up as too much trouble when the fabric marker turned out to work less well on the polyester thread than on the cotton fabric. Using fabric paint will take forever, since you can only paint the thread on one part of the garment at a time, lest you transfer wet paint to another part of the fabric. Disperse dye Fabric Crayons, such as Crayola Fabric Crayons, can be used to make iron-ons that you then transfer to the thread with  a hot iron; any disperse dye that you mistakenly get on the cotton should wash out later. Of course, it will take a long time to cover all the thread. 

Finally, you could mail-order some of Jacquard Products "iDye Poly" and boil your cargo pants with the dye; iDye Poly is a low-energy disperse dye that will dye the polyester thread without dyeing the cotton fabric. (It can be mixed with their hot-water cotton dye, named plain "iDye", and applied at the same time, but the "iDye" dye will wear off far more quickly than Procion MX dye, unless you apply a cationic dye fixative afterwards, such as Retayne or iDye Fixative.)

Also see my page, "Dyeing thread in pre-sewn clothing", in the FAQ section of my website.

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