Marigolds holding out on me like they do. I see no reason why this flower could not just go ahead and bloom, but clearly it thinks otherwise.
Been to Mass this morning at the Abbey, after a long morning walk with Dora. I'm wearing my wool Sierra dress, which again is proving to be a more comfortable summer dress than I was prepared to expect. Here was the walk look:
I got a little sweaty --- it's not so hot here today, but it is very humid --- but the wool fabric stayed fresh. All I did for church was pop on my coolest possible thrifted cardigan and switch out the EVA Birks for Mary Janes:
I anxiously await the arrival of my dye order --- I'm itching to experiment with color on my already-stained bamboo dress. Then I'm also pretty psyched to try over-dyeing my Camellia dress, to achieve a more saturated, intense shade of blue (which I hope will then be easier to match with thread for mending, because finding anything remotely like that lapis color is harder than I would have imagined).
Otherwise . . . it's a summer Friday. Not much going on. Watching a chickadee at the bird feeder, trying to get some work done.
LATER:
Well, I done it.
Here are the dyes I bought, as well as the color remover. The color-removal process itself was interesting --- a bright purple dress goes through a phase where it looks like this:
I almost took it out at this stage, because I thought the color was so pretty, but it was also uneven, so I left it in for nearly an hour.
End result: not such a pretty color.
One thing I hadn't entirely banked on, though I should have banked on it, was that the color remover wouldn't touch the purple stitching, which is obviously not a natural fiber. So while I had originally intended to dye this dress pink, I didn't think I'd like the outcome. I was afraid it would be too pale to hide the dark stitching on the inside, and create too much contrast in the hem. So I decided to go with blue --- I can easily buy more to redye Camellia later on.
I mean, did I need another blue dress? Or to put it another way, why wouldn't I need another blue dress? At any rate, here is the dress I ended up with:
It's still wet right now, having been laundered after the dye job. I combined both the royal blue and denim dyes and left the dress in for about an hour. The result is this fairly dark indigo/navy shade.
Now, in fact, I already have a dark-blue short-sleeved bamboo swing dress. But the blues aren't the same:
This new one's a bit grayer, more like a washed navy, while the originally-blue dress is closer to (and in fact even a tad brighter than) marine blue. The newly-dyed blue dress is also a medium, not a small, so is a shade longer, which I think I may find more versatile.
There is a subtle weird place on the front:
But it is pretty subtle, and I doubt anyone but me will ever notice it, especially if the dress fades a little with future washings, as I sort of hope it will, like a pair of blue jeans.
The purple stitching at the hem still shows, but the contrast is so low that I don't think anyone would ever notice if I didn't point it out.
This was pretty fun and not hard to do. I used a teakettle plus a saucepan of boiling water, then cold water from the hose, since I was performing this operation outside. The dye bath was plenty hot --- hotter, probably, than I would use for wool.
Anyway, the stains came out with the color remover, which was the chief thing I was worried about. I'd like to get some more color remover and run my husband's undershirts through it, to see if it takes out sweat stains as readily as it took out whatever kind of stains were on this dress. And now I have . . . another blue dress . . . but I am that person who cannot have too many blue dresses.
And I've broken the ice with bucket dyeing. It's a thing I now know I can do. I might find something else to experiment on before I essay dyeing my Camellia, but I am kind of jazzed to see how things might turn out. And I do still want to turn something pink!