How do I dye my dark blue cotton sofas a lighter shade without using bleach?

Name: Becki

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Country or region: UK

Message: I'd like to dye my dark blue cotton sofas a lighter shade. Perhaps light grey or blue. How do I remove the dye without using bleach? So far I've tried sodium percarbonate. Nothing happened. What do you suggest I use?

Use fabric, not chemicals, to change the color of your sofas. Use new cotton fabric, in whatever color you like. Buy a book on how to do your own reupholstering, or pay professionals to reupholster your sofas, or buy slipcovers for them.

Percarbonate and perborate are known as "color safe" bleaches, because the hydrogen peroxide that they liberate, when dissolved in water, is very unlikely to remove a significant amount of the color from fabric.

You can't use dye to lighten the color of anything, because dye is transparent, so the underlying color always shows through. Instead, to lighten the color of fabric, you must use a dye discharge chemical to damage the dye molecules so that they lose their color. The two main types of dye discharge agents are hypochlorite bleach, which you've already rejected (and which will cause serious damage unless you can completely rinse out and neutralize all of the remaining hypochlorite afterwards), and reductive discharges such as Color Remover, which require heating the dyed material in a container of water with the dye discharge agent. Obviously, this will not work at all for upholstery, unless you remove the fabric from the furniture first. (See "What chemicals can be used to remove dye?".)

It is possible to use an opaque fabric paint to cover a dark color, but the results will rarely look good, the amount of paint required to cover will feel slightly rough, and the large amount of opaque fabric paint that will be required will cost more than making a new slipcover. In addition, fabric paint coats only the surface of the fibers in the fabric, so it wears off relatively quickly, meaning that the results do not last nearly as long as the results of reupholstering. Most fabric paints are transparent, rather than opaque, so they cannot cover a darker color at all.

For more information, see:

Can furniture be dyed successfully?

Scarlet Zebra's Instructions for Painting Upholstered Furniture

[Review of] Simply Spray Fabric Paint for upholstery

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Posted: Thursday - September 15, 2011 at 07:13 AM

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How do I dye my dark blue cotton sofas a lighter shade without using bleach?

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