Fun with a Wedding Gown and Dye

Ooooooooohhhhh yes ma'am. That's right. I did it. I took a beautiful Maggie Sottero wedding gown and dyed it. But I can do that with no remorse because it wasn't my gown. A previous bride of ours sold this gown to me. No, this was not her wedding gown. And then I used it in a shoot. Well, I'm not a recycle kinda gal so it's been sitting in my basement waiting for some new idea to pop up. And then it dawned on me...I'll dye it! I searched the internet trying to figure out if this was even possible and if so what my options were. I came upon this blog post from a woman that dyed her own gown. I couldn't find any posts about dyeing such an intricate dress as the one below but I figured I had nothing to lose. I wanted to dye it black but I realized after a little research the best I would get is gray. Fine by me!

Before:

So, armed with 2 bottles of Rit Dye, a pair of rubber gloves, one gorgeous gown  and my washing machine I dug right in. You'll see in the blog post above she soaked her gown. Well my mom and I used to dye things all the time growing up and we did it in our washing machine so I figured that was the easiest and least sloppiest option. Unfortunately I don't think it allowed the gown to soak enough in the dye because it came out light gray but also with a hue of purple/blue.

Round 1:

So I just wasn't happy. So, armed with 3 bottles of black Rit Dye plus 2 powder packets of Rit Dye, I decided to soak it this time like the woman did in the blog post above. At first I thought it did nothing but I realized after it dried that it did make it darker and took out about 90% of the purple/blue hue. My only concern was the details came out darker, which made me think of prom. But I'm over it. I like it!

Round 2: (apologies for the bad photos here...taken on my iPhone).

You can see the interior material is still purple but fortunately the chiffon and exterior layers dyed darker.

Coming to a fabulous shoot soon!