To easily dye shoelaces any color, you will need to buy 100% cotton shoelaces. These are generally not available in local stores, but you can buy them by mail-order from Dharma Trading Company. Use a good fiber reactive dye, such as Procion MX dye, Tulip One Step Fashion Dye, Dylon Permanent Dye, or any good tie-dye kit (not all-purpose dye, such as Rit). Any good tie-dye dye can be easily used at room temperature, with no need for the boiling hot water that all-purpose dyes require. You can tie the shoelaces if you want parts to remain white, or you can just lay them out flat and squirt or paint the dye on. For bright, non-muddy colors, be careful about color placement. If you place red next to green, or orange next to blue, or yellow next to purple, the colors will run together and make brown.

You can also use all-purpose dyes, such as Rit dye, for coloring 100% cotton shoelaces a single solid color. All-purpose dye works best when the material to be dyed is simmered for half an hour at 190°F with the dye. It will not last nearly as long as a good fiber reactive dye, and it does not work as well for multiple colors, since all-purpose dye tends to run when wet.

Most of the shoelaces you can buy in stores are made of synthetic fibers that won't take any ordinary dye. Usually they are not even labeled as to their fiber content; if your package does not say 100% cotton, you can assume that your shoelaces are 100% synthetic fibers, which are more difficult to dye.

The only dye you can use to dye polyester shoelaces is disperse dye, which you can't buy locally. All-purpose dye, such as Rit, will not work on polyester shoelaces, and neither will the fiber reactive dyes found in good tie-dye kits. You can mail-order disperse dyes as "Prosperse" dye from PRO Chemical & Dye or "iDye Poly" from Blick Art Materials. To use them, you have to boil the laces in the dye for half an hour or longer. Nylon shoelaces are easier to dye, as they can be dyed by boiling them with acid dye, or with all-purpose dye since it also contains acid dye, but they also will not take the dye from a tie-dye kit, unless you can substitute an acid, such as vinegar, for the soda ash (impossible for those kits that have the soda ash already mixed in with the dye powder).

Alternatively, to permanently color synthetic-fiber shoelaces, you can buy Fabric Transfer Crayons, which contain disperse dyes instead of the wax found in ordinary crayons. Use the Disperse dye crayons to color your designs onto paper, and then use a hot iron to transfer the design to the synthetic fiber. This will not work on natural fibers, but works great on polyester, acetate, nylon, and even acrylic. (Be careful not to melt the plastic aglets at the end of the shoelaces!)

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