Clothing dye

detoxkid

I am thinking of dying an old nude Karen Millen dress as I never get any wear out of it. I have not dyed clothes since my dodge teenage ty-dye (SP?) phase so don't really know what kind of dye to use and as it is a good dress I don't want to distroy it completely!

Grateful for advice on the following:
1/ is this a job for a professional and if so who, a dress maker?
2/If not what brand of dye would be suitable?

The dress is a mixture of lace, satin and mesh

Hoping someone can help!

baby and crumble

Hey!

I do a fair amount of dying, and the main thing you should know is that different fabrics dye differently- in other words if you decide to dye your dress blue, for example, the lace will be a different colour to the mesh, and the mesh will be a different colour to the satin. Satin doesn't take dye terribly well in my experience, so it will look fairly 'washy'.

As for home dyes, i find american apparel brand very good for strong colours, but you have to be really careful washing them afterwards, they tend to wash out more than other brands, like dylon.

UNless you're happy to write off the dress if it all goes wrong, i wouldn't advise it. Even if it were 100% cotton (which dyes the best of fabrics in my opinion) very often threads, buttons, zips etc that you may not have noticed before won't take the dye and will look really obvious.

detoxkid

Thanks Zoegh that's really useful