Looking to dye a pair of your jeans? While denim is incredibly strong, durable and resilient, it’s also susceptible to fading. This isn’t something that happens overnight, but months or years or use will eventually cause your jeans to fade. The good news is that you can often restore their color by dying them. So before donating your faded jeans to a local charity, follow the steps below to dye them.
What You’ll Need
The only thing you’ll need to dye your jeans is, well, dye. Rit dye is an excellent product that works well for this purpose. It’s cheap, effective, and sold at most Wal-Mart stores (as well as other retail stores). If you want to achieve a dark color, however, it’s recommended that you use two boxes of dye instead of just one. And for an indigo color, you should use three boxes: two blue and one black.
Getting Started
There are several different ways to dye jeans, but the easiest is to use your washing machine. Fill your washing machine with warm water and add the dye. Now stir it around to ensure the dye is distributed evenly throughout the water. Place your jeans inside until they are completely submerged and wait.
Optional: you may also want to add 1/4 cup of salt to the water. The purpose of the salt is to help protect the new color from fading. While it’s not necessary for dying jeans, many people have found that salt does in fact protect against future fading. Besides, it’s not going to hurt anything, so go ahead and add a bit of salt to the water.
What Next
After allowing your jeans to soak in the dye/water solution for a minimum of 30 minutes, turn your washing machine to the drain cycle. Now run your jeans through two additional wash cycles using only cold water (no detergent or no dye). Once they are finished, remove them from the washing machine and hang them out to dry. Sorry if you were expecting more, but that’s all it takes to dye your jeans!
Your jeans should now have a deep, dark color that reflects the dye of your choosing. You can preserve the new color of your jeans by flipping them inside out when you wash them. Another tip to protect against fading is to wash with similar colors. I know this sounds like common sense, but you would be surprised to learn just how many people toss all of their clothes into the same load.
