I read a lot of tutorials on how to dye suits here, and went through a lot of trial and error trying to get my suit right. People suggested using several boxes of dye in a washer, one fellow suggested tan dye, and other suggested using purple or navy dye while others said that was uneccessary.
Well I’d like to try to clear things up with the process I went through.
Before we start, one important thing you need to know is that whatever you put dye in will get dyed. Even stainless steel. I dyed my sink this way, and only managed to get most of the color out with an overnight soak of a bleach solution. I also ruined a stock pot this way. Not because it go dyed, which it also did, but because the fact that the pot absorbs dye means you can never use it to cook again or the dye will leach into your food. Also, RIT color remover is a harsh chemical and boiling that in the pot actually left some rust spots around the water’s surface, or maybe they were spots of dye from the suit. I’m not sure. Anyway, those don’t come out either. You also probably don’t want to use one of those cheaper porcelain pots.. The blue ones with the speckles for example… At least for removing dye, because the color will probably leach out. But for dyeing alone, those might work. Then again they might react with the RIT dye. I don’t know. I doubt they would react with the dye, but the color remover, that would certainly be a concern.
Now, let’s start dying our suit!
First thing you need to do is get rid of that velcro patch on the chest. Snip the threads from the FRONT side of the velcro all the way around the edge, and then pull it off. Pull any threads left out the back side of the suit, and you should have removed it cleanly without cutting your suit. Don’t worry about the tiny holes you see in the suit fabric, they will dissapear completely as soon as the suit is washed.
Now, wash your suit. No need to dry it.
Btw, you can wash it again with half a bottle of vinegar at any point to soften it up a bit. Old wive’s remedy I found online. 
Now, open up all the zippers on your suit, and undo all the velcro so you can get the air bubbles out evenly and you can be assured the dye will get everywhere.
Now, get yourself a white plastic trash bin. Why white? No dye to leach out into your suit! Throw the suit in there , fill it with as hot of water as comes out of your taps, and then push it down to get the air bubbles out and keep it under the surface of the water. It doesn’t matter if it’s bunched up, it’s not going to get splotchy. Now, take it somewhere well ventilated or at least where you won’t be breathing the fumes.
Now, get yourself some safety goggles, a face mask, snd rubber gloves, and pour in one packet of rit dye remover slowly so you don’t get a bunch of dust coming up in your face. Stir the suit well with a wooden stick or something else you’re not going to use for food. Make sure all the remover dissolves. It likes to collect on the bottom.
Now, make sure your suit is still fully submrged, and leave it in there overnight.
When you take the suit out, it’s not going to look a whole lot different to you, and you will think you need to keep adding more color remover or boil it. I did all that. It does NOTHING MORE. Wash and dry it.
Do NOT at any point use bleach to try to remove more color. It can melt the synthetic fibers.
Now that it’s dry, you may notice it’s not that hideous yellow color anymore, but it’s not exactly WHITE either. It’s more of a nice khaki. But khaki is not what we’re going for. At least not your standard khaki.
Now, if you look real close you will be able to see little yellowish khaki threads mixed in with light khaki ones. The yellow threads are the rayon. Rayon is a plastic, and removing color from it is impossible. That’s why no matter how much you try to remove the color from that suit it will never get any less brownish khaki.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t change the color with other means!
Now, it’s time to dye the suit. You may try the washer method, but you’ll need a lot more dye. I used the boiling method.
To dye it, you’ll need one box of RIT pearl gray powder, and one box of RIT purple powder. (The powder is cheaper than the bottles and 4x more potent.) Take a 10 quart or larger stockpot (you can probalby use one of those cheaper blue porcelain ones) and fill it with hot water up to the bottom of the handles, and bring it to a near boil. Now, with your safety goggles, face mask, and rubber gloves on, pour in the box of gray dye, and add exactly one level teaspoon of the purple dye. Do not use more than that much purple dye, it’s very strong and you don’t want a purple suit!
Now you may be wondering, why purple? Well what we want to do to get the suit less khaki is neutralize those yellow fibers. And while we can’t dye them, the suit is 60% cotton, and cotton will dye. So we give the cotton a slight purple tint, the complimentary color to yellow, and your eye sees the two colors in the very fine threads mix together as gray. Now, I know you hear “purple tint” and you get worried like I did, but we’re talking a very slight purple tint and even looking very closely at the fabric the only thing you’ll ever see that looks funny is those yellow threads if you look really carefully. The cotton threads will may as well be gray for all you care.
Now that you’ve added the dye… stir the hell out of that mixture with your stick. Then stir it some more. You won’t be able to see the bottom of the pot, but like the dye remover, the dye doesn’t like to dissolve completely, and if you do not stir it enough you will get dark spots on your suit.
Now, take your suit and in your sink or your tub, give it a good soak. Wring it out a bit so you don’t drip water everywhere.
Now, dip the suit into the pot, feet first. Why feet first? Well, if you didn’t stir that dye enough then the bottom of the legs will be the bit that most likely gets the splotches on them this way, and those will be tucked into your boots so at least you won’t see them.
Once you have the whole suit in the near, but not quite boiling water, stir it with your stick, pushing it down into the pot, stirring it around as best you can, (it will be a tight fit getting the suit in there) and trying to flipping it as best you can occasionally. Do this for 30 minutes. Once the 30 minutes is up, pour the dye and suit out into your sink, while running hot water. Pour slowly so you get most of the dye to go into the drain, because you don’t want to stain your sink. You could also pour the dye out outside if that is an option for you. That would be better. But do NOT pour the dye in your toilet or your bathtub. Porcelain is porous and will stain much more easily than your kitchen sink!
When I removed the dye from my suit btw, I poured that dye remover out in my tub and it was okay, so you might be safe with that. But don’t do it with the dye!
Once you’ve poured out all the dye, you can rinse the suit off a bit in cold water. You want to use warm water first just so you don’t get wrinkles in the suit, according to RIT anyway, but I don’t know for sure that’s really an issue.
Then it’s back in the washer with detergent again. And then you can wash it again with vinegar if you want to soften it, or just use fabric softener dryer sheets I guess. I just don’t like the waxy feel and scent of those. And no, the suit won’t smell like vinegar when you do this.
And voila, you’re done! Well, you’re done if you like the grayish khaki color I ended up with. I think it looks great and not really dark like some suits I’ve seen here. But, if it’s not the color you want, you can try dying it again with another teaspoon of purple and see how that comes out. But don’t go crying to me if your suit ends up purple.
The good thing is, if you use the dye remover you can get back to step one again, even if you end up with black and yellow splotches all over the suit and wash and dry it like I did when I was experimenting. That’s how I found out soaking overnight with just one box of dye remover worked great.
The one thing I know you do not want to do is try to use TAN dye. Someone suggested that here, and the suit came out a dark tan color, nothing at all like the GB suits. Plus on top of that it dyed my velcro brown. and the velcro is plastic, a diffeent kind than the rayon I guess, and it takes the color but you can’t really remove color from it. So once you’ve got brown velcro you can maybe get it to be black, but never a lighter color again.
One more thing you need to know is that you may see some suits here with gray zippers. I don’t know how they got their zippers to be gray, but the dye does not affect the paint color at all, nor does the dye remover remove the paint. That’s part of the reason I didn’t try to get my suit any more gray, because the grayish khaki I got not only looks good, but goes well with the zippers. Pure gray if it is even possible to get would not go well with khaki zippers.
The last thing I wanted to mention is the belt and the hose.
I got a white belt, and when I added the gray dye to the bath for the suit, before I added the purple, (because the belt has no yellow in it) I dipped the belt in for about 30 seconds. That grayed it up a little. It looked grayer when I removed it than it came out after a wash though, so you might want to do it for more than 30 seconds if you want a gray belt rather than a white belt that looks like its been around the block a few times. But that’s the effect I wanted, so that’s what I did.
As for the hose, the hose is tricky to dye. If you leave it in the dye bath too long, you will get a bright yellow opaque hose, that may become transparent again only after several days. It will look all wrong and you’ll think you screwed up and need a new hose.
The way to dye it properly is to fill your pot with water halfway. About a gallon of water I think, and then add one half packet of yellow dye. Get the water boiling, and make sure the dye is all dissolved and then wrap your hose up so it’ll fit in the pot and dip it under the water holding it there with your stick for exactly two minutes. The boiling water will open the pores in the hose to allow it to take the dye, and two minutes is just enough time to get the hose properly yellow, but not turn it opaque.
I also tried to make an amber hose like I saw in one of the GB pics on google, but I later realised the color in the image was off. But if you want an amber hose you need to get some scarlet dye and sprinkle in only the teeny tinest amount, and then run a series of tests with little bits of hose adding only little srpinkles of red dye as you go till you get the right amber color. It takes VERY little red dye to get the amber color. We’re talking less than a quarter of a teaspoon. You must go slowly and do the test pieces for two minutes each if you want amber. And if you ad too much red, you have to do a whole new yellow bath cause adding more yellow won’t get you back to where you were.
Well, that’s all for now. I’ll post a pic of the suit when I can do so in proper lighting conditions.