Name: Heidi
Message: I have interior house paint that I had made to match a bedspread I have. I can not find any curtains or material that matches the color. Can you use paint as a dye for fabric? And if so, how would it be done?

If you were to use wall paint on fabric, the results would feel very unpleasant: stiff and hard. This would not be very pleasant to touch. Perhaps this would not be too much of a problem on curtains. Try painting a small piece of any fabric you happen to have on hand, and see just how stiff it becomes, to decide whether or not this would be workable. Vertical blinds tend to be stiff, anyway; perhaps paint would be less unpleasant on them.

However, to leave the fabric of the curtains feeling like fabric, you can use fabric paint that you mix until it is the same color as your walls, or you can mix dye to more-or-less match the color of the paint. Fabric paint is much softer and nicer-feeling than wall paint, though it does make the fabric somewhat stiffer and less soft. There are many different fabric paints available; see the listing on my website's list of Sources for Supplies .

Dye does not alter the feeling of the fabric at all, but your choice of dye must depend heavily on what fiber the surface of your curtains are made of. The best choice would be to obtain some plain white 100% cotton material, preferably PFD (prepared for dyeing), or at least all cut from a single bolt so that all of the fabric will dye the same color. On cotton fabric, your best dye choice would be fiber reactive dye, such as the Procion MX type dye sold by the various mail-order dye suppliers listed on my Sources for Supplies page. ProChem and Dharma each sell a wide range of different pre-mixed colors. See if any of the colors they sell are close to the color you wish to match. It may be best to aim for a mottled effect, using low water immersion dyeing, to be sure that the overall effect will be one of matching, rather than of being slightly off. Note also that ProChem provides a color-matching service for dye.