Getting my trousers scanned to paint bleach mark!

managed to splash some bleach on the knee of one leg. It's quite a small mark but they are a dark clay colour and it stands out like a sore thumb.

getting a tester pot of oil paint in the same colour.

Depends if you want them to look like you spilt bleach and then paint on them! Your best bet is to find a permanent marker of about the right shade and dilute it down with alcohol. Then paint it in carefully to build up to about the right shade - matching luminosity is essential.

The hard part is getting the edge right without producing an dark ring.

I have done this to disguise damage to wood veneer furniture reasonably well. It might work on trousers but I doubt it will ever look decent. Wood grain helps hide a multitude of sins a flat colour is unforgiving.

Snag is that permanent markers are not all that permanent either.

managed to splash some bleach on the knee of one leg. It's quite a small mark but they are a dark clay colour and it stands out like a sore thumb.

getting a tester pot of oil paint in the same colour.

I don't think that you cn get a tester pot for oil paint, only emulsion. I did try because I only had a small area to paint but was unsuccessful. Maybe one of the other paint brands but I don't think Dulux do.

em I managed to splash some bleach on the knee of one leg. It's quite a sma= ll mark but they are a dark clay colour and it stands out like a sore thumb= .

If there is any spare material (inside a turn-up, pocket, etc) then an invisible mender could fix that and the patch would be almost invisible. M&S *might* be able to send you a swatch if you email customer disservices.

Or you can get special fabric paints, but I think you'd need too much trial and error to get a close match.

Owain

You cannot be serious?

Seems a bit odd that a bit of bleach should do that, I wonder what the colouring dye was?

Brian

Yes the telling time is the next time its in the wash.

Brian

It is surprisingly common - bleach sees off many organic dyes.

A woman in front of me was trying to return some bathroom towels that had obviously been damaged by spilling toilet bleach on them. The customer service desk gave her extremely short shrift.

I was expecting to be told that the reason my shoes had failed inside a week was that I had been wearing them but they took one look and said ah yes the ones that the heels fall off (batch with a moulding fault).

Thinking about it wood staining dyes might be his best bet.

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com:

Turn them into shorts.

i would try coloured pencils and then try and seal it

I have tried various coloured pencils and markers and it is an unusual colour and difficult to get a good colour match!

On 22/01/2013 14:40, Martin Brown wrote: ...

Why not cloth dye? Rather than trying to match the colour, choose a darker colour you like and re-dye the whole trousers.

Colin Bignell

Live with it. IME anything you do will only make matters worse

em I managed to splash some bleach on the knee of one leg. It's quite a sma= ll mark but they are a dark clay colour and it stands out like a sore thumb= .

and getting a tester pot of oil paint in the same colour.

A little applique is probably the best option, but you can only get away wi= th that if you're a woman. So you need applique and a sex change.

I wouldn't try paint, its never going to hang ok. Permanent markers could r= educe visibility, but they will wash out somewhat with each wash. If you ca= n grab a little bit of fabric off a turn up etc, thats your best bet. Its n= ever going to look right though, whatever you do.

NT

I've tried that - the bleached area seems to take the dye differently, though it does make it less noticeable.

Bleach the entire trousers first?

Colin Bignell

Buy new trousers. Use damaged ones for messy d-i-y jobs.

Many fabric dyes have warnings that they will not "hide" bleach marks

managed to splash some bleach on the knee of one leg. It's quite a small mark but they are a dark clay colour and it stands out like a sore thumb.

getting a tester pot of oil paint in the same colour.

Yes

or is this a sensible approach?

No!

Did that with a khaki shirt, i.e. I spread the bleach stain over the entire surface. The fabric bleached evenly and nicely, but the thread used in all the stiching didn't...

Thomas Prufer

I did something similar with a 35% cotton/65% polyester shirt that had been splashed with bleach. I put it in a bucket of (diluted) bleach for a week. When it came out, it was the same, bleached colour all over. But only 65% polyester.

Nick