Advice for Dying Jeans Black?
Hi all! I'm looking to dye my USN dunagrees black because I'm tired of trying to find a good pair of black flared jeans. They are quite blue and so I know this may be more intensive than I expect. They currently look kinda like the photo.
I was going to use Suay in LA but I'm concerned about the long wait times or having them be potentially lost, so i might as well try to DIY it myself!
Im probably going to follow the Rit dye and use their black and their fixative, but wanted to see if anyone had any experience with using them with blue jeans. A few guides say to add in orange to help counteract the blue, but Im not sure how much orange I should use. Should orange be used immediately with the black dye?
Open to all help before i buy the dye and do it! Thank you!
14 Replies
I havent dyed blue jeans, but my experience of using back dye is that its pretty hard to get a true black with it, and you might need to do a couple of tries, particulary if over dying. Ive also seen where people have used colour remover before dying to make it easier to stick, so that might be an option rather than messing about the with the orange?
Yeah I've overdyed scraps of denim for patches and also found it hard to get them beyond a dark navy
Maybe that's where the added orange helps though?
But yeah I would advise weighing them and making sure the fabric is well under the suggested dying weight - and then probably still doubling the amount of dye :P
Stripping the colour first might be the way forward
I’ve used rit dye on brown canvas pants before. I just followed the instructions on the back of the bottle and was quite happy with the result.
Black is a pretty strong color so it went easily for me. Make sure you have ample room in a bucket or your sink so the pants can dye evenly. The water needs to be very hot as well.
I like the look of overdyed pants since the old color peeking through is really cool to me. As others have said if you really want a deep black then stripping color and dying multiple times can get a better result
Thanks all!
looks like color remover wont work on indigo apparently
so i guess a mixture of black and orange might work!
im assuming doing some black and orange together first and then do another black bath to get it darker lol\
I don't have advice but I'd love to see wip and results
Yeah same, and fingers crosssed.
got 2 bottles of black and one orange along with the dye fixative. wiill see if i can do this in the weekend and get back with results!
Couldn’t wait, so here we go!
I did half bottle of orange and two black gonna leave it in here for a few hours
It’s not bad!
I think some of the threads might be poly because they’re still pretty blue
And in the above, you can see they have a blue tint to it, rather than grey
I could try it again with black dye and more orange but I think because the originals were super blue, it might be a non starter
My process was hot water with two bottles of black + orange, stirred for like 20-30 mins. Sat in and stored on and off for 2 hours (aka when I had a break from work).
Then I soaked in hot water + dye fixative, rinsed, washed, did a cycle in the washing machine and dryer
Yeah looking good