Today we are going to take a little field trip. This is my dad’s workshop.
Like me, he has a million different hobbies and passion projects and side gigs, but his
main career has been as a tradesman repairing leather and vinyl. If you were going to, say,
re-dye a pair of leather Regency era reproduction boots to a light, buttery yellow to match the
boots worn all throughout Emma 2020… he’s the guy you’d want to do it. So I thought
I’d take this opportunity to interview him about the process of re-dying leather,
and to make much more than a simple DIY tutorial, but an actual lesson from a professional.
Okay, here’s the deal. A lot of people come to me.
They’ll buy a nice shoe. They’ll look at it, they love it, but they don’t like the color. Now,
they can be re-dyed. There’s a couple of basic principles I want you to know,
so if you try it yourself, your chances of first time success are greatly increased.
Alright. So the main key to making the dye stick and bond and hold and have durability, is it’s got
to bond to the surface. Now a lot of times I’ll show people, it’s like the pores in any surface.
Of course, vinyls and leathers are extremely porous, and that’s good,
because when the dye gets down in those pores and is on top,
it bonds very well. Now, a lot of people, if it’s not a brand new shoe, will have maybe some grease
or dirt or oil or maybe they put a conditioner on here, and that actually fills the pores up with
oil or something that will keep it from sticking, so cleaning, is important.
Please ignore the tape on the sole. We got a little out of order on the steps,
but cleaning really should be done first, to give the tape the best adherence to your leather. My
dad cleans and scuffs the leather simultaneously. Cleaning is especially important when you are
working with old leather, as it may have soaked in years worth of oils and acids and dirt,
all of which will fill and close the pores and prevent the dye from bonding properly with the
leather. Scuffing, on the other hand, is important with new leather like this,
where the fresh dye will be similarly filling and closing the pores. He recommends using a
kitchen scrubber for the cleaning, because it will gently scuff the leather as you work, but
won’t be as abrasive as something like sandpaper would be. Now, we’re using a professional cleaner,
a very strong, nasty chemical which he needs for extremely old, oily leather, but here he said it
was a bit overkill. You, working from home, can clean and scuff your leather just fine
by using a kitchen scrubber and water mixed with Dawn dish soap. Scrub in small circles,
and be gentle whenever scrubbing over stitching or trim or anything less sturdy than the leather.
You wouldn’t want to fray it. Try not to touch the leather after you clean it, as you’ll just
get oils right back on it. If you wipe it down, use something microfiber or otherwise lint-free.
As a final measure, right before you’re ready to begin dying, you can wipe the leather down
with some rubbing alcohol to free the surface of any remaining traces of oil.
The next step is to tape off anything you don’t want dyed. My dad recommends 3M brand tape,
and I’m using automotive tape, but that’s just because it was what was on hand. You
could probably use painter’s tape. The key here is perfectionism. I used small pieces,
and pressed the edge with my nail into the crease between the sole and the leather.
I covered the entire sole with tape. Then I taped inside the shoes too, right along the edges of
that petersham ribbon. I’m going to dye right over it, but I like the sort of purply leather lining
this part, and don’t want to dye over it. Taping this was tricky along the base of the tongue.
I did the best I could, wedging the tape down into the crevice. But at the end of the day
that part will never be seen. I mean, the inside won’t really be seen in general, but the top edge
might a little bit. I should have also taped the inside of the tongue, but I forgot about that.
In the end it worked out, and I don’t think I got any dye inside the tongue. But I did
have to work more carefully and slowly, so taping now would have just made the dying later easier.
Okay, so Mariah took the time to take the tape, tape really close along here, that’s actually
very important, so we get a good bond. Now, as you can probably assume, there’s a lot of junk
tape out there. The cheaper the tape, usually the junkier the tape, and it doesn’t stick!
And then the dye bleeds underneath it, it’s a mess… do yourself a favor, get some 3M or
name brand tape that sticks and bonds really well. It’ll save you a lot of nightmares.
Okay, my dad buys his leather repair products and dyes from Superior Restoration.
It’s a bit of an old school company, mostly selling to professionals.
I think my dad literally still orders over the phone. He wasn’t even sure if they had a website.
I looked it up and they do, but it isn’t a terribly user-friendly site, especially
if you don’t know exactly what you’re buying. I will link this listing for the basic dye he uses
in the description box. At $19 for an 8 oz bottle, I think that’s reasonable for a single project.
8 oz would cover MANY pairs of shoes. However, that is only if you want to dye them a single,
basic color. If you want to mix colors and make a custom or matched shade, that’s where
this could get pricy. To match this yellow, for example, we ended up using 5 base colors.
If that is what you want to do, I would recommend finding a kit or sample set with a small quantity
of each color. The only other cheap option I can think of is to see if you have a leather
repairman in your area and ask if he would let you buy a small amount of dye. He might even be
willing to do the color mixing for you. However, that will depend entirely on where you live.
My dad is one of the only old-school leather repairmen operating in central Illinois.
Like cobblers and plumbers and other trades, leather repair is dying out a bit
If you choose to look for dye from a different brand, the important thing is to look up
“water-based leather dye”. My dad says that most dyes are either water-based or lacquer based.
Lacquer based used to be the norm 30 years ago, but it smells terrible and is probably really bad
for you. Water based dyes are just as strong, but you do need to shake them well before using them,
because they have a tendency to separate. He keeps a bag of marbles on hand, and puts one in each
bottle of dye to help it mix better when he shakes it. One caveat though: if you are dyeing leather
suede, you want to look specifically for “Nubuck Dye”. It is a much thinner and more watery dye,
so it takes more coats. But it doesn’t change the suede or make it stiff and shiny. I don’t want to
recommend a particular brand, because I’ve never used anything but Superior Restoration for myself.
Here’s where I’ll have to leave you to read reviews and make your own judgement call.
There were also two other products he recommends. I’ll let him explain,
but it’s entirely up to you, how much you want to invest in a single project,
or if this is something you think you’ll do often enough to balance the cost.
There’s two additive I want to tell you guys about. The first additive is called Crosslinker.
What it is is, when you pour it in, it literally bonds all of the molecules together
of the drying dye particles, and long story short it makes the dye 10x stronger. You don’t
need much of it. 1, 2, 3%, but boy does it make a huge difference in strength. It’s just clear,
doesn’t affect your color, but it definitely affects your strength and your durability.
Then there’s one more additive. This is called Slip. What this does is you just add a little bit.
What it does is, the feel of the leather, it makes it super baby soft and it just gives you that
sensation of a super nice, refined leather coating, it only takes a couple seconds to
put a little in there, but especially when you’re doing a sofa or something that you’re gonna touch
and have physical contact with. For a shoe it’s not so important, but for most things,
it’s a great additive.
Next we got to work color matching the yellow. Our first mixture was way too brown.
It took many rounds of lightening and brightening to get it just right. The final mixture ended
up being mostly white dye, with a good amount of gold, a tiny amount of brown,
bright yellow, and orange. Color matching is a skill my dad has honed over an entire lifetime,
and there is no simple youtube tutorial that will instantly transfer it to you. The best explanation
I have is that he can look at a color, and pick out and separate all the subtle variations inside.
Undertones, tints, saturation, level of shine. The color wheel does provide you with a good cheat. If
your mixture is too green, for instance, you can simply add a bit of the color opposite green on
the wheel, so red, which will tone down the green. Which is also why my sister buys green-tinted
makeup, to cover the redness in her skin. I felt bad because it seemed like we were wasting
a whole lot of dye, but the clever trick is that my dad simply mixes the extra into a brown bottle.
Get it? The color brown is a mixture of all color, so if he continually mixes extra into that bottle,
he’ll have a brown that he can then use as a base and color match in future projects.
Anyways, I was being pretty picky. Even buying the shoes during the preorder sale, they were still
booty expensive, and I didn’t want to dye them a color I was going to be not quite happy with.
Also the dye dries darker than you’d expect, so every time I thought it was almost right,
we’d dry it and see that it still needed more white or gold.
But in the end we arrived at a shade that I saw as the same light, buttery
yellow that worked so well with all of Emma’s pastels, and I set to work dying the shoes.
Now, as far as applying the dye, there’s usually about three ways people do it. Most professionals
spray it. Now I hardly ever, ever do that. Simply because, if I’m in someone’s home, or someone’s
car, or even in my own location, if I’m spraying dye on something, and I don’t have a paint booth
or something that’s evacuating the air, that’s gonna get in the air, it’s going to float,
and you’re going to end up dying your surroundings a little bit at a time. I don’t like that idea. I
may be the only person that does this, but you can buy these little foam rollers at Menards,
Lowes, online, and you get the little handle, and you dip it, after you mix your dye, in the dye,
and you literally roll it on. And it can go on very uniformly. Kind of rake it back and forth
to get a uniform coat. Usually you put 2-3 coats on, depending on how much of a color change you’re
trying to do. If you’re trying to cover a dark color with a light color, then maybe a few more
layers. Now, you don’t want to just keep dying it. If the dye gets too thick, it’ll look okay,
but it can crack and peel if it’s too thick. Now just the uniform understanding of dye is that it
is a color coating. The main difference between dye and a paint is, paint dries pretty hard and if
you flex it a lot, it’ll crack. Dye is designed to have an incredible amount of flexibility,
otherwise it would just crack. So the main difference between dye and paint is flexibility.
I’ve got to admit, I was a bit skeptical about the foam roller. I’ve used them before,
helping out with big projects, like re-dying entire couches. It seemed unnecessary for such
a small project and I was tempted to just use a rag. However, I’m glad we stuck with the roller,
and if there’s a few extra bucks you could spend on this project that will be totally worth it,
it’s this. The thing is, rags smear the dye. You get too much on and it runs and drips. It coats
unevenly. Rags are linty too. Foam rollers on the other hand hold a great amount of dye. You
can lay it on thick with the end of the roller, and then use the middle to roll it back off and
wind up with a perfect, even, smooth layer. The foam doesn’t leave little lint specks behind,
and it’s great for dabbing and squeezing over the crevices and getting dye down into the cracks.
I used about three layers, which was maybe more than I needed. My dad does use a heat
gun to dry the dye between layers, but that’s mostly so that he can work faster and finish
jobs quicker in a commercial setting. If you are working for yourself, you don’t need a heat gun,
but you could use a hair drier while you’re mixing the color to dry your swatches faster so that you
can see what the set color will be, and not be tricked into thinking it’s lighter than it is.
But for the main body of the shoes, they dried fast enough without a heat gun. I rotated between
shoes, and let the dye barely dry to the touch before starting each new coat. I used the cotton
dabber to get dye down under the tongue tab, and down into the crevice where the tongue attaches.
The best surprise of this whole project was that I was actually able to dye the shoelaces. I didn’t
think we’d be able to, and thought I’d just have to be happy with the ivory until I could maybe
find a yellow ribbon that matched well enough to use instead. I dyed them by holding a section
of the cord in my fingers and running it across the roller. I twisted it up and down as I ran it
back and forth, so that the whole cord was coated evenly. The laces are cotton or some other fiber,
so I knew that if I wasn’t careful they’d soak up a ton of dye and turn out super stiff.
To keep from getting the dye on too thick, I avoided dipping the roller back into the dye.
Instead I added a few drops of dye at a time with the cotton dabber. The plastic aglets did not
cover well. Not that dye wouldn’t stick to them, but I kept holding the laces by the aglets and
rubbing the dye off. I probably could have done it if I’d simply dipped the aglets in the dye at
the end, and let the excess drip off, but it's a small thing. But I’m really glad to have shoe
laces that perfectly match these boots. I feel like they cap off the final, professional look.
So, vinyl and leather dye, water based, I usually tell people,
like if it’s a cushion on a couch that they’re going to actually sit on,
give it 48 hours, two day. Now, the dye sometimes even with a really good tape and tape job,
might try to bleed under it, so usually I would recommend once it’s dry to the touch,
not cured for a couple days, but you’re still kind of finishing up your project,
start taking your tape off, because if any of that bled under there, if you try to wipe it off now,
it’s gonna come off way easier than after this dye sets up and cures and gets very very
strong. So it’s just kind of a practical thing. So far, look at that. That edge is really nice,
okay. So far, so good, but you do need to use a high-quality tape.
You do need to take your time. Look, that’s a super good edge, actually I’ve done this for 33
years. That’s exceptionally nice. I like that. Which of course saves you time later trying to
clean it out of the edge, which, ugh, is hard, because if you clean it too close,
then you start taking the dye off up here and you have to put more dye up here, back
and forth soon you’re kind of chasing a rabbit. This actually looks like a very clean, nice edge.
Well that is a good, strong tape, but that’s what you want.
Otherwise you’re gonna really be wishing you had a good tape.
Look at that. That’s pretty nice. There’s a little bit of an edge there. Just a little bit.
But you can literally take your finger and kinda smooth that edge a little bit, because the dye’s
still not completely set up, and it actually even looks a little better. Just a little bit better.
Right there. Very nice job. Very nice job.
So, just as he said, to finish the project you need to take the tape off, and you need to do
it now, while the dye is still soft. After you remove the tape, look for little places where
it might have leaked or gotten under the tape and clean them off right now. You could use your nail,
or a damp corner of a cloth. But be careful not to clean too close to the leather.
After the job is finished and you are happy, let your leather sit and cure for 48 hours,
just to be safe. One subject we didn’t really touch are clear coats. They exist,
they help to protect the dye, but we didn’t get into them because I didn’t want to add any,
because these are historical reproduction shoes and I didn’t want to add anything that
could possibly make them shiny. I didn’t want that. I’m happy with them the way they are.
So here they are, finished. I really love them. I wasn’t 100% sure about the color,
just because it’s so hard to go off a glowing image on screen. I think the result is either
spot-on, or just a tad light. But either way, I’m happy with it. They will look great with
lighter spring colors, and work well with any Emma costume I might choose to recreate.
Judging them critically, there are a few tiny lint flecks that got into the dye.
This divot here wasn’t us. That was an existing imperfection. It’s alright though. The corners
of the sole were hard to get, and there are a couple places where I missed.
There are a few spots where the dye got on the sole a tiny bit,
and a few larger errors inside on the lining. You can see along the stitching where I got the
layers a tiny bit thick. See how it softens and dilutes the texture of the stitching?
But none of that will ever be noticeable to anyone, and overall I give it a 98% perfect.