Last night Chase helped me boil a ton of water and put it in a bin (because I don’t have a pot big enough to properly do the stove top method) so I could dye all of my fabric.
The dye took pretty quick. I did leave it in for about 30 minutes, but there wasn’t anymore colour change between 5 minutes and 30 minutes.
Chase hung a line up on the back porch for me! I can finally actually hang stuff outside! Yay!
I didn’t take the skirt apart, even though I probably should have. I needed to flip it anyway, since I’m using the wrong side now, but oh well.
Once the single pieces were dry I brought them in and compared them to what was left of the original fabric:
It’s not a giant change, but it’s what I had expected and what I had wanted. The same colour, just more blue-toned.
As usual the crazy lights in my room are sucking a lot of the tone out of these photos. Even to the eye… last night I was considering getting a purple and black and mixing them to try to get yet another shade darker. But I stuck my head in my office this morning to look at it with fresh eyes, and was pretty happy with it. I’m not going to keep fidgeting about over what is just supposed to be a “for fun” costume.
I had a little bit of some of the dye staining in spots – nothing too terrible, one of the shoulder pieces, one of the back pieces and a few small spots on the skirt… I’m going to guess that’s because I couldn’t find my regular “dyeing stick” and had to use a shorter spoon, I probably didn’t get all the way down to the bottom and get everything stirred up properly.
I got the bodice pieces pinned back together. I accidentally pinned the center front on shiny side up at first — then decided I kinda liked that and left it.
I also played around with the idea of using the dull lavender front piece from the original bodice as the center front, but next to the other colours it’s coming off as a bit grey.
Now I’ve got to decide how I want to do the patterns on the front piece. I’m guessing it’s going to have to be painting it, though the idea of that is scary. At least I have a back-up piece I can use (I had double pieces of the side front and center front) if I mess it up.