How to DIY a Super Cute Ombré Sweatpants Set

Tools and materials:

• Plain white loungewear
• Liquid fabric dye in purple, pink and yellow
• 3 continuous spray water misters
• Bathtub or shower
• Drop cloth
• Plastic bags or scraps for stuffing
• Washing machine

1. Choose your dye

If you are going to use regular fabric dye, you need to make sure that your clothing is 100% natural fiber. Whether it is cotton, linen or silk, it needs to be 100% natural. 

If your clothing is a blended fabric (for instance, 60% cotton and 40% rayon), then you must use synthetic dye.

If you don’t, then your dye may look great at first and then – poof! – it’s going to wash right out of your clothing.

2. Soak your sweatshirt

Your loungewear needs to be damp when you are dyeing it, so soak it in your bathtub or shower.

3. Stuff your sweatshirt

Use some old plastic shopping bags to stuff the inside of your sweatshirt, including the body and the arms.

4. Dye the front of your sweatshirt

Mix your yellow dye with water (according to package instructions) in a continuous misting spray bottle, and spray the collar area of your lounge sweatshirt.

Next, do the same with the pink dye and spray that below the yellow.

Go back in with your yellow continuous spray, and some of the yellow over the top portion of the pink to get an orange-toned blended color effect.

I continued blending from yellow to orange to pink down to the waistband.

I then added purple dye, with the continuous spray bottle, to the waistband and cuffs only.

5. Dye the back of your sweatshirt

Flip your sweatshirt over onto a clean surface, and repeat step 4 on the back of your sweatshirt. 

Tip: Make sure that you do the inside of your cuffs as well, just in case you want to cuff your sweatshirt. 

6. Dye your sweatpants

Repeat steps 2-3 with your loungewear sweatpants. 

Make sure you start working on your sweatpants on a clean surface.

Start dyeing the sweatpants from the waistband.

As with the sweatshirt, I did the waistband of the pants in solid purple. 

Then, move to the pink dye, with heavy saturation on the top, then light saturation, then yellow at the bottom of the sweatpants. 

Use the yellow to blend up into the pink for the orange-toned ombré effect.

7. Wash your loungewear

Remove all the bags from your clothing and put your loungewear into your washing machine (with no other clothing!) with detergent and on a gentle cycle.

8. Hang your loungewear

Hand your loungewear up to dry.

9. Bonus: Ombré shorts!

The sweatshirt and sweatpants looked so great, I decided to dye an old pair of plain white shorts as well.

This time I used only purple dye, by varying the saturation from heavy to light as I went from waistband to hem on my shorts.

Here’s the completed ombré-dyed sweatshirt and sweatpants.

The sweatshirt with the solid ombré-dyed shorts look great, too.

Ombré sweatpants set

This ombré dyeing technique can be used on almost any piece of clothing. Try it on a sweater, a pair of jeans, or a jacket next, and leave a comment to let me know what you dyed and how it turned out.

For another fun DIY, check out my post on How to Create a Crystal Embellished Denim Jacket.