Has anyone ever managed to take an outfit from staining to truly not?

Just a random point of curiosity that popped into my head. Has anyone ever managed to truly stop staining from an outfit that previously stained?

I know people have tried soaks, washing, fixatives, etc. to get excess dye out of clothing to stop them from staining.  I've tried various approaches too.   My experience is that outfits that stain will always stain.  You can sometimes reduce it but that's it.  If you leave it on long enough it will stain the doll.

So has anyone truly taken an outfit from staining to not?  Meaning you can leave it on for months or even years and come back and not find a stain?

If so what did you do, and how bad was it at staining to begin with?

One personal test that comes to mind was the red skirt from a Volks Wizard outfit.  (Forget the full name.)  Stain monster.  Touch vinyl and vinyl turns red.  So I decided to see if any amount of washing would fix it.  I just tossed it in every load of dark items I did until it started to fall apart.  Even the faded worn garbage that it was at point still managed to stain vinyl.

Edited June 23, 2022 by scripple

I've spoken about this before, but it's not possible to re-bond dyes to fabric. Once the fabric has been manufactured, the dye is going to be volatile to some extent. Some worse than others. There are a lot of old wives' tale methods using salt or vinegar but they don't do anything in actuality, they just wash out excess dye, which makes it seem like they work.

The other problem with trying to fix dyed fabrics is that, in finished pieces, the dye will stain undyed parts like trims or linings, so it's not worth trying in the first place. You'll just take a good item that happened to stain and ruin it entirely.

The only fabrics that have been proven to not stain, to my knowledge, are man-made polyester fabrics where the fibers are made of the coloured material, not dyed. You also unfortunately have to test fabrics before knowing if they will stain or not, fabric type can't be used as an indicator.

Agreed dye fixatives don't work after dying, and as you said fabric type isn't enough.  I have cottons that haven't stained and synthetics that have.

My curiosity is has anyone managed to get the excess removed enough that it's no longer an issue.  No longer an issue in this case means no visible to the naked eye stains.  (Ok, old folks like me can use reading glasses to check.)

I would assume that it's impossible to make a stain-prone fabric entirely stop staining, as the issue is that the dye is not adhered to the fibers, and thus will always slowly escape the fabric one way or another. And since vinyl loves to absorb things, our dolls will always facilitate that process. There's a possibility you could remove enough dye to no longer stain, but in doing so the fabric would probably be significantly lightened in colour.

Itwould certainly be an interesting experiment to try, though!  Just how faded would fabric need to become before it stopped staining? Would reds remain red or would they become pastel pink? Are any colours able to be saved at a decent saturation? Does black or navy stain forever until it becomes pale blue?

As I said in the opening post I did try once with a red item.  By the time I gave up the red had faded to pale pink and was still able to stain.  But that's just a single experiment.  I've tried washing other items and not had any success, but I didn't wash them to death rather just assumed if a wash or two didn't have a significant effect I was done.

The question of this thread is have other people tried experiments (whether viewed as experiment or just something they did) and had any success.

Back in 2014 I saw a picture of Wolfheinrich's custom Excellen Browning and instantly fell head over heels in love with her so I got the fullset doll just for the outfit because had already bought the body and the head in case I couldn't find them later.

When she arrived I immediately took her out (and noticed how ugly her original sculpt was) but never having owned all black tights and top before I figured they could prove dangerous but her body was kind of a throw away one anyway so I put her together using  that body and not to my surprise it did stained horribly all over the legs and her torso in a matter of minutes.

She stayed that way for some days for the body was all stained anyway. Before I switched to the body I got for her I gave the black items a really deep wash by hand using dish soap which took like forever but in the end managed to get all the dye out.  

Now, I've always done this with anything too bright or dark because i don't wanna get my girls stained nor i want to use those unflattering body suits and I've seen the following: water by itself won't wash the excess die, doesn't matter how many hours or days it sits in it. It has to be liquid soap and it has to be handwashed, the stronger the soap the better. Nowadays I use Dawn brand dish soap because it'll get the job done faster. To ensure that everything is coming out I do it right below the faucet on a white bowl to visually ensure that the water coming out after each rinse gets clearer and clearer till its 100% clear water, that's when i know I'm done - It'll take something between 5 to 10 cycles.

After doing the process mentioned above I went to use the newly washed items on the new body and never got any stains again. Eventually I changed her outfit to something more and used the thighs on Lily for months straight with no issues whatsoever.

I'll still do this to this day with every new outfit and live stain free, hope it helps 

Nice to hear a success story.  Thanks.