#51 dyeing a dress (or: making a dress to dye for)

*I promise, there is only one other dye pun in here.*


My sister, Jenna, is getting married! She met the love of her life last year, and they're looking forward to getting hitched here in Virginia in July. They've already started planning the wedding, and one decision they made is a general color scheme - basically a rainbow sherbet of yellow, pink, orange, and aqua. Sissy (which is what started out as a joke nickname, but I now just call her) has a good idea of the style of bridesmaids dresses she'd like her girlz (that z was intentional, thank you) to wear too - knee length, cotton summer dresses. In conclusion, we have officially made it nearly impossible to find coordinating dresses. 


The good news is that Sissy is a genius and realized that it would be easy to find white knee length, cotton summer dresses, and she figured out that we could dye them. So we went to Rit's website (that's a fabric dye company, for those of you who, like a week ago me, didn't know) and discovered that not only do they have an array of color options, they also have dye recipes, so we can get uber specific. You people may not be excited, but we were wholly thrilled. So thrilled, in fact, that we could not wait to try our experiment out.


On Saturday, a mere two days after our fashion epiphany, we went to Old Navy and Sissy bought an adorable white dress. We forgot to take a before picture, and Old Navy doesn't have it on their website, but it was straight up white like snow or a lamb or the dude that plays that funky music.


We took it back to her place, and I started dyeing while she slaved away making food for my baby shower. Basically, I put super hot water in a plastic tub, poured in half the bottle of dye, stirred, then added the dress. The instructions said to "continuously agitate the garment for 30 to 60 minutes," so I started yelling obscenities at the tub, but I ran out of things to say after like a minute and decided to try stirring it instead. Stirring a pot of clothes made me feel like Charlie's mom in that one really boring song that I always skip from the 70s Willy Wonka. So that was new too. Never felt like her before.

Sidenote: We tried not to get any of this in the food Sissy made.
We didn't want anyone dyeing from it. Har.

After a half hour, I rinsed out the dress and ran it through the washer and then the dryer. This required patience, which was lame. But it was worth it! Check out the finished product:

Wouldn't you just swear that this came in this color?!
And isn't Sissy adorable?!

This is a first that I will definitely repeat. You know, because we're going to do this for the dresses for the wedding. So fun!