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All this talk about pants reminded me about a post I made earlier this year.
I have a couple of pairs of heather grey Cliff Keen combo pants that fit great, are comfortable and are structurally sound, with no rips, tears, stains, etc. As far as the fading, that's another story. I've seen umpires wearing pants that have that weird pinkish color and it looks awful. So, this fading issue is something I'm always aware of and looking for in my own pants.
These pants looked fine to me and I wore them without reservation. Then, one day as I'm getting home from a game my wife meets me in yard and casually says, "Why are you wearing pink pants?"
Naturally, I'm devastated! In an instant, I went from thinking I was a sharply dressed and properly uniformed umpire to being "one of those guys"!
Now, she did go on to say that, "They didn't look that bad", "They're not really bright pink", and, "It kind of depends on how the light is hitting them". But it was too late. I was on a mission to do something about my pink pants!
Replacing them was the obvious solution, but I wondered if there was some way to salvage these otherwise perfectly fine pants that I really like. When this subject came up last summer, I posted that the thought crossed my mind to try dying my pants, either to restore the heather color or maybe to match the newer charcoal shade. I mentioned that I would post the results of my experiment here, but never got around to doing that.
That is mainly because once I looked into what it takes to dye polyester I didn't even attempt it! Unlike other materials, dying polyester requires special dyes and toxic chemicals, combined with temperatures near the boiling point of water and potentially explosive conditions. Everything I read said that if a conventional dye was used (like the Ritz stuff you can buy in most stores) that it would not absorb. It would simply lie on the surface of the material, then rinse off when the pants were washed.
So now I'm stuck with some pants that will probably be relegated to lower level rec league ball- and a good reason to spend more money on new umpire stuff!
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