**NOTE: **This recipe will ONLY work on cotton suits or poly/cotton blends. It will NOT work on Nomex. RIT Dye requires natural fibers like cotton, and doesn’t work well on synthetic fibers. Nomex is synthetic. It will **NOT **significantly lighten OR take RIT dye. Ever.
I’m providing my dye recipes for the two varieties of flightsuits I’ve successfully used it on: Tru-Spec and Rothco.
Rothco suits are made with a higher cotton content material and are therefore easier to color strip and dye, yet suffer from thin material, ugly tailoring, cheap construction, and ugly poly zippers.
Tru-Spec suits are made from heavier material with better and more accurate tailoring, higher quality construction, and brass zippers; however, they have a higher polyester content and are therefore more difficult to color strip and dye.
Use whichever suit meets your requirement in regard to budget, ease of modification, appearance, and overall quality.
Tru-Spec Recipe:
Rothco Recipe:
My Rothco suit started as a black poly/cotton flightsuit, purchased in 2003 from Outinstyle.com. You can find these all over the place, and they are very similar to Fox brand flightsuits (though I cannot confirm that this dye recipe will work verbatim). Both can be found for around $30.
All steps are important to the finished results, including the preliminary washing. Be sure to use water as hot as you can physically get it. Use your black uniform gloves if you have to, to be able to stand the heat, but the hotter the water, the better the suit take the dye.
The liquid dye seems, to me, to take effect much more quickly than the powdered dye, and is easier to measure and work with.
The suit should be good to go for a few wearings and washings. It will eventually start to lighten, however, and the remedy for this is simple. Just fill up the washing machine with hot water, pour about 1/4 cup of liquid Navy Blue RIT and some salt into the water, and add the pre-soaked suit. Put it through the wash and rinse cycle, and the color should be refreshed.
However my recipe was a bit different. Here’s what I did:
NOTE: All wash cycles are done HOT/COLD.
I took two black Rothco uniforms and put them in the washer with detergent.
Removed suits from washer, ran them through a full load of water with 1 cup bleach. After wash cycle completed, I wasn’t happy with the color (not enough appeared to be removed) so I put them in again with 2 cups of bleach and let them soak for about 30 minutes and then restarted the washer. After the wash cycle had completed, I put the suits in the dryer. They were a dark grey color with white specks.
I filled the washer with hot water, added 1 cup of salt and 2 bottles of Navy Blue Rit dye. While washer was agitating, I ran the suits under hot tap water. Noticed brown water was dripping off the suits. I stopped the washer and put the suits in a bathtub half full of hot water and sloshed them around until no more brown dripped out. I put the sopping wet suits in the dye bath, started the washer and allowed it to run through the “heavy” cycle.
I then ran the suits through a complete hot wash cycle with detergent and put them in the dryer. The suits were pretty good but had too much blue tint to them. I put them back in the washer and filled it half full of hot water. I then stirred the suits around by hand for a few minutes,drained and repeated this until the water did not show any signs of bleeding dye. I put the suits back in the dryer and this is the result I ended up with. Probably not the most economical as far as dye jobs go but I’m glad I didn’t do both suits individually. I’m happy with the color. Outdoor lighting reveals a mostly grey tone which is what I was going for. I know the dye is still in the suit as the white specks it had prior to dyeing are no longer there. The suit appears to be one solid color which is good.
This saved my butt when doing some other costume dyeing. Their colors are pretty much spot on.
You’ll see the recipe for charcoal grey is equal parts blue and black. I’m thinking a really weak black solution would MAYBE turn your suit charcoal grey. If it turns out too dark, wash repeatedly until you get the color you were looking for or the dye stops bleeding out Charcoal grey will look black when wet so keep that in mind. Best of luck to you!
I removed the nametag velcro but not the belt or wrist velcro. Sorry for not specifying that earlier. During the entire dye process the velcro remained black and really doesn’t detract much from the suit IMHO.
From that site, it states it might be impossible to dye a fabric that has more then 50% polyester… my blue flightsuit has 65% polyester, so I get it might be close to impossible to perform such a transformation
On the velcro matter… if you remove the velcro, it will end up being unchanged (black) and if you leave it, it seems to stay black as well. I understand taking off the nametag velcro (needs to be removed anyway) but I wouldn’t touch the rest.
After I washed and dried I washed again with 1 cup bleach. It didn’t seem to take any color off so I did it again with 2 cups and it came out to a really dark brown, so I died it like you said but I forgot the salt so I dipped it a 3rd time but I added salt to the dye bath. Pulled out dried and so on and that’s out it turned out. I’m disappointed it didn’t come out to be more of a gray, it seems maroonish. Did the lack of salt do that or something else?
It’s good enough for me but would have liked it more greyish…
What brand of suit did you use? Your results sound similar to slimershomie who used a Tru-Spec suit instead of a Rothco and got the dark brown color instead of the gray that Teliwhy and I ended up with.
I know the bleaching probably took all the information off the tag, but is there any other info you could give to help us out? Such as where it was purchased from, what model number suit, etc.? This is not only to help me try to figure out what happened but to help others out when purchasing a Rothco suit. Maybe it will be an “at your own risk” kind of a thing but I’d like to know if there is anything else we can find out about the suit. In the meantime, I’ll write Rothco and see if their black flight suits have different fabrics or dye processes.
Thanks for the heads up, RayBan and like I said if you could post anything else about the suit I’d appreciate it.
I sent a letter to Rothco asking if there was any change in the dyeing process with their black flight suits. I doubt I will get specifics from them but it is worth a shot. When I dyed mine I noted that in between the 30 minute soak in the 2 cups of bleach and the pre-soak for the dyeing that I had a lot of brown water running off the suit even though it appeared to be grey when dryed. I rinsed the suits under hot water until I had all of the brown bled out before putting them in the dye bath. It could be that this is the brown that remained in your suit but I could be wrong. In either case I guess I just got lucky with mine but I’d hate to think that Rothco uniforms are not consistent as this would make the dye recipe a bit riskier. I’ll let you know if I discover anything else that might lead to a definitive answer.
One other question- how long did the suit soak in the 2 cups of bleach when you bleached it the second time?
I didn’t let the suit soak in the bleach either time. I just poured the bleach into the washer as it was filling up then I put the suit in and let it do its business. The suit was still a pretty dark brown when I started to dye.
I’m wondering if the problem was that the suit went through the bleach so quickly. With mine I let the second bleaching soak for about 30 minutes and then of course I rinsed mine thoroughly. I still don’t remember the suits looking brown in between bleachings but of course as I said there was definitely something brown in the suits when I rinsed them prior to dyeing so my guess is not enough of the brown got taken out.
I e-mailed Rothco and got no definitive answer from them.
Right now my wife and I are in the process of purchasing a house so a lot of our stuff is getting boxed up and ready to move. I should be settled in at the beginning of August and at that time if nothing else is found out, I will order another Rothco uniform and bleach it twice without letting it soak and see what color I get. I saw the pictures of your uniform, Dan and I think that these photos coupled with the experience I had leads me to believe that the reddish brown color I saw washing out of my suits did not completely come out of yours and this is what is making the uniform appear brown. I think if just a tad more brown had come out of the suit you would get the grey that Teliwhy and I did with our suits.
On the bright side, this may be a good way to get a brown RGB suit.
