Changing colours

A few weeks ago I went to the annual church craft de-stash sale that I've mentioned before ... a very happy hunting ground for bargain-priced fabric. This time I was fully prepared: large amount of cash in small denominations, several shopping bags and ready to rummage. As last time, it was super crowded and awesome. I picked up a heap of quilting fabric and several lengths of dress fabric that people were very happy to get rid of. Win win!

One of them was a reasonably ugly tan coloured linen that I decided to dye. I did the burn test and it definitely had some poly in it, but thought there would be enough linen (or cotton) to make it worth dyeing so I did a deep red in the hope it would come out a sort of chestnut or darker brown. I'm not used to full-immersion dyeing so I put it in a bucket and weighed down another bucket on top.

It didn't work very well - the colour didn't change much and it was badly blotchy. I might have another go using more dye.... or I might just use it for some item of clothing that screams "rustic" or "homespun" and tell everyone it was a design choice.

In other more successful colour-changing news we repainted number one's room. After a gap year spent pretty much within these four walls we were all happy to take the furniture out, scrub and scrub and scrub, then undercoat over the Egyptian Gold (a June 2009 project, so chosen by a six year old, surprisingly  nice) and make it all new and fresh. And buy a new king single because child is LENGTHY, which is very good for painting the tall bits. It was a fair bit of work but satisfying all round, especially coinciding with a 19th birthday :) So grownup.....