I’m posting this to help others, or at least giving them a starting point to tweak from.
Originally posted in the “RIT DYE” thread.
I then color stripped it again for 1/2 hour.
I still had my dye mix from the night before and cooked it for another 25 min. after washing it was still not quite right, so I added another grey to the mix and cooked for 20 min this morning. I also never added the detergent the first time, so I added it to the mix. I don’t know if that slows the dying process or not but it definatly didn’t take the color as fast as the first time.
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It looks pretty close to me now, as well as changes colors in different lighting situations like it’s supposed to.
Just out of curiosity, Spike was your suit previously dyed prior to the color stripping or did you take your Rothco suit out of the package, color strip and dye? The dye job looks awesome, btw.
I did try colour it from when i took it out of the packet. It looked the closest ive ever got it to the films. But whenever i tried it on i didnt feel like i was in same uniform as the first film. When i saw this page i decided to grow a pair and try again. I colour stripped all the grey dye i added before and it seemed to remove some of it original colour too making it lighter.
Seemed to help the colours of the grey be less dark and coloured.
The reason I asked is because I had a suit that I had dyed previously that came out completely too dark and was splotchy. I sat it in color remover, washed it and redyed it. It came out looking really close, so I decided to try the recipe with another suit. I soaked it in color remover and used my same recipe and the result was not as close as I had hoped. I understand that a previous dye job will most certainly impact the fabric and its ability to take dye, but I’d like to find a recipe that does not entail wasting dye.
Since I am making two suits, I think the best thing to do to cure my frustration is turn my half load recipe into a full load recipe and do both at one time. As long as the suits match each other I think I will be ok.
These suits were taken out of the package, washed, color stripped, washed again, dyed and washed. I think this is a pretty good color for the suits. I figured rather than start yet another topic on dyeing these I’d just post the pictures here. What do you guys think?
What kind/brand of suit do you have? I noticed that the Rotchco suits (what mine are) are a different khaki color than the Tru-Spec. In fact, the two Tru-Spec suits I purchased from the same company were different shades of khaki so making a universal dye recipe for a Tru-Spec would be something where you would have to accept certain variances in the outcome.
I think the thing to do with the suit is put it in color remover and then see what color it most closely resembles. In the case of my Rothcos, they were VERY yellow after color remover. Using Eric’s words of wisdom I consulted a color wheel and found yellow’s compliment (which is purple). For every box of pearl grey, I used one cap full of the liquid Rit dye complimentary color. This may need to be tweaked for a good final result but hopefully this is a base you can start from.
