I haven't written in a couple of weeks, but I haven't been idle, I swear! Just look at this dress. When I bought it earlier this month, it was pretty ridiculous looking. This color combination just...doesn't work for me. I'm not sure the photo does full justice to the mess of weak red, grey-brown, and almost-pink that this thing came in, but believe me, it was bad. (If you love it, I apologize. I'm probably crazy.)So I decided to dye it. I'd never dyed anything before aside from tie dye at summer camps, but I'd seen RIT dye at drugstores and had always wanted to try it. I also considered using natural dyes for this, but I've heard that it's hard to get really dramatic results with onions/tea/etc.
Isn't it surprising that pharmacies and hardware stores still carry this stuff? How many people dye their clothes any more? I imagine each store must sell about one package per month. Their website seems to be marketing to my demographic, so maybe there's some kind of underground dye revolution going on among the young folks.
The bad thing about using this dye is that it's got lots of chemicals (maybe not toxic, but I wouldn't want to drink the stuff), and the directions instruct you to scrub everything that came in contact with the dye (bucket, sink) with chlorine bleach. I really didn't want to buy a big container of bleach to flush into the water supply, so I mixed the dye up in an old stainless steel stockpot, and disposed of it in the kitchen sink, which is also stainless. And indeed, there were no stains.I wanted to somehow unify the colors in the dress, and so I picked the midpoint between black, brown, red, and pink: purple. (Also, my choices were somewhat limited by what RiteAid had in stock: fire engine red, sunflower yellow, forest green, "denim" blue, mauve, black, and purple.) I didn't want the color to be too dark, so I mixed a third of the detergent into hot water with a lot of salt and a little detergent. I was surprised that you have to add soap to the mixture to get it to set, but I'm sure there's a good explanation for it. Unfortunately, I guess I didn't have enough water in this initial bath, or the water wasn't hot enough, because I later discovered that the salt and dye had not completely dissolved. As a result, there are some little speckles on the dress where dye pellets adhered to it in the initial dunk. But the pattern is so crazy that you can hardly tell.
Despite the long, long list of directions inside the dye pack, the process was pretty simple. Dissolve dye in some hot water, add salt and detergent, add to larger bucket of hot water. Pre-wash garment, then soak in clean hot water. Add garment to bath. Agitate. And agitate some more. The package says to stir the whole thing constantly for up to thirty minutes. I wore rubber gloves, but I still got overheated, standing over three gallons of steaming hot dye and swirling, swirling, swirling the dress. That part wasn't very fun, but it was cool to see the color take and develop.
I left the dress in for about 15 minutes. At that point, the color looked pretty dark, and I didn't want it to obscure the pattern altogether. I accidentally splashed a dish towel that was on the counter in the midst of my agitating, so that went into the bath, too. Now I wish I'd thought ahead and lined up a few things to dye, because the towel came out looking great and didn't add much to the workload.
The dye pack said that the color would dry much lighter than it looked wet, but I didn't realize how much lighter. I would say that the final color was about half as dark as it looked coming out of the dye.I'm happy with the final results, though. The pattern still looks outlandish, but the palette is a lot more cohesive. And the process was fun. You could make it even easier by doing this in the washing machine (there are instructions for that, too, on the package), but we live in a big building with just two collective machines, and I was afraid I'd screw up the process and all our neighbors would end up with purple-tinged t-shirts. Someday I'll have my own machine, though, and then I definitely intend to try it that way. I also want to try shoe-dyeing sometime, but my current running shoes are still too new and nice to experiment with.
And that's not all I've been up to! But right now I have to go out and enjoy the long weekend, so next time: saft.
