Have you any advice to turn the stitches as black as the rest of the jacket?

Name: Shirley

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Dye polyester and poly/cotton blends

Country or region: UK

Message: Hi, my son dyed a cotton jacket with polyester stitching, Black. Needless to say he did not expect that the stitches would remain pale grey. Have you any advice to turn the stitches as black as the rest of the jacket?

This is a common problem. See my FAQ page, "Dyeing thread in pre-sewn clothing".

None of the remedies seem very good to me. I'll describe them, and you can decide which you prefer:

1. I've tried coloring with fabric markers over undyed polyester stitching, but the markers came out lighter in color on the polyester, so the results weren't worth the trouble, and it was a surprising amount of trouble. You never realize how long the seams at the hems all around a garment are until you work on every inch of them.

2. More effective is to use disperse dye, made into special paint or crayons (such as the Crayola Fabric Crayons in the ad to the right), to create long, narrow iron-ons, and then press with a hot dry iron to transfer the dry disperse dye onto the stitching. This is even more trouble than coloring with markers, so I can't recommend it either, but the color will be better. Disperse dye used as an iron-on does not require the intensifier chemicals that make immersion dyeing polyester so unpleasant, so I think this is the least undesirable of the three remedies.

3. It will work to dye the threads, if you dye the entire jacket by immersing it in an enormous cooking pot with disperse dye, plus the intensifier chemical often supplied with disperse dye, but this, too, is a lot of trouble. First, you have to obtain a stainless steel or enamel cooking pot that is large enough for the garment to move in freely, at least two or three gallons in size, which you don't plan to reuse for cooking food. That is generally a sizable investment. An aluminum pot will be okay for dyeing with disperse dye, but it cannot be used with other types of dye. You have to mail-order the disperse dye, which is the only type of dye that will color polyester. (You can order Jacquard Products' iDye Poly from Fibrecrafts in the UK.) You have to boil the garment in the dye for half an hour or longer. The smell of the intensifier chemical, during the boiling, is extremely unpleasant, requiring excellent ventilation; when using disperse dye, I had to open all of the doors and windows, in addition to setting fans to blow out of the windows, and yet the odor was still very strange and unpleasant. It would be better to set up a hot plate to boil the dyebath out-of-doors, rather than cooking the dye in your kitchen. The disperse dyes themselves don't smell too bad, but they work much better on polyester if you include the intensifier dye carrier, which is included in the packet of iDye Poly.

The best answer is, before ever starting to dye, to choose PFD or RTD clothing for dyeing. PFD means Prepared For Dyeing, and RTD means Ready To Dye. PFD and RTD garments are sewn with cotton thread, so the thread gets dyed along with the cotton in the rest of the garment. Unfortunately there are only a few places that carry much PFD or RTD clothing in quantities suitable for individuals to buy, and those that do carry the right sort of clothing do not have every style that you are likely to want. Alternatively you can dye fabric, and choose pre-dyed fabric in a color you like, and have a local seamstress or tailor copy the garment. This may be expensive, depending on the style.

The simplest answer is to look at the contrasting-color stitching as a decorative element. It does look fine in many garments. It's unfortunate that this does not work for every style.

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Posted: Saturday - September 04, 2010 at 09:43 AM

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Have you any advice to turn the stitches as black as the rest of the jacket?

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