Name: Laurie
Message: I bought 2 second hand (almost sheer) white pillowcases. They're made 100% polyester, with 100% nylon lining. The washing directions say warm/minimum wash. They feature a lot of ruffle detail, so there's alot of stitching in it too. I was hoping to dye them a bright green, but unsure if the heat will destroy them. And would I use dye for nylon or polyester? I'd love your help. Cheers.

I'm not sure that this is a project you really want to get into. You would have to use disperse dye for the polyester, which would require hard boiling for an hour to try to get the dye to penetrate. No other type of dye will work on the polyester, though the nylon will also take the disperse dye.

Your question of whether this treatment would destroy the details is a good one. We can't know for sure until you try it. Another question is whether it's worth it to you to buy a large non-aluminum cooking pot for dyeing things like this. It's hard for someone who does not dye constantly to invest in a very expensive pot that you can never cook in, but it is not safe to use dyeing pots for food.

Solid color dyeing of polyester is not a good project for a beginner at dyeing, but there's another type of project you might consider doing with these pillowcases, instead. It's very easy to create disperse dye iron-ons, to add your drawings, or a child's drawings, to the white pillowcases. You could easily use tracing paper to copy a design from another item in the same room, such as a wallpaper design or a design from printed fabric, even if you aren't much of an artist. The high heat of the iron actually works better than even boiling water temperatures to transfer dye into polyester, if you have the right sort of dye crayons or dye paint. See "Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes".



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