Day 289: Tea Dye FAIL
Not all of my refashioning efforts end well. Here’s an example. I began with this stark white coverup.
There’s nothing really wrong with it, but I hate wearing white. I’m really clumsy, and it’s always just a matter of time before I end up dousing myself in mustard or marinara sauce. :/
A couple of people have suggested that I try dyeing a piece or two with tea. I’ve seen quite a few things that have been dyed this way (mainly period costumes), and thought it was worth a try!
First, I brewed a pot of tea.
I used Chamomile, as my extensive (Google) study on the subject of tea dying assured me I’d end up with a pretty yellow hue.
I added my dress.
And nothing happened.
I left it in the tea bath for a couple of hours.
Nothing continued to happen.
I have no idea where I went wrong on this one. The dress was 100% cotton, but it wasn’t taking the dye at all! 🙁 I removed it from the tea bath, rinsed it, dried it, and looked at it again. I hoped that if I squinted hard enough, I’d be able to tell a noticeable difference. Yeah…no.
Time to go back to square one. Tea clearly wasn’t powerful enough to dye what should have been a really easy to dye dress.
It was time to level up! 🙂
My next attempt, as you can see from the photo above, was to dye the dress with coffee. My logic went something like this: Tea isn’t strong enough to get me going in the morning. Coffee is. Therefore, if Tea isn’t strong enough to dye a flippin’ 100% cotton dress, Coffee should suffice.
I let the dress steep in the hot coffee for a couple of hours.
I felt like maybe this time I had managed to make this white dress look at least a tad less white and more antique-y. I rinsed it, dried it, and put it on…
Egads! It still barely took any color at all! Ugh!
So…that’s it. This one was a dismal failure. They can’t all be golden, but geez did I ever try!
If anyone knows what I did wrong here, please please let me know!
Despite having barely made any sort of a difference to this dress, I still enjoyed wearing it at the beach all day! 🙂
Hmmmmn…maybe if I use a little fancy photo editing, I can fool you guys into thinking this actually worked…
I promise to do better tomorrow!
