Good Thing I Learn From my Mistakes

...just wish I didn't make so many. Here is the dyeing story.

I decided to try dying some beige fabric to see how it would look for the backing of my beach quilt .   Well from the above picture you can see it was somewhat a success with a .5m piece of fabric.  I really like this color, yes it looks a bit grey but it has some peachy tones as well.  Now the real challenge....dyeing a 5 m piece and having it turn out like this.   I had a 2.5m piece already cut so I just cut another 2.5m piece ( first mistake).  Since this job would take a lot of water i had to find new containers to mix dye and soak the fabric in.  I found one large bucket so thought I would just mix the dye and water and then add the fabric into the bucket (second mistake).  So dye is mixed, I grab the first piece and put it in the bucket then grab the second piece and put it in the bucket...no problem (that I know of) so far.  Wait 2 hours and then once I had the fabric dry I realize one is much darker than the other one....WHAT???  How could this be they were in the same bucket.  After talking with Lori she said what probably happened was I added one piece of fabric into the dye first which absorbed a lot of the dye so by the time ( 5 sec) the second piece was added the first fabric had taken in a lot of the dye since there was so little dye in the water to begin with. So lesson 1 - dye backing in one piece and lesson 2 pour dye over fabric.

Then after much deliberating I decided to re-dye the light ( third mistake).  I get everything ready, grab the fabric, put it into the jar first and then pour the dye over ( mistakes 1 and 2 fixed).  I turn from admiring my accomplishment to see the a piece of beige fabric on my counter, double take......AHHH ....I dyed the wrong piece (I have lost count of my mistake by this time).  Sigh....okay get another jar place the light colored fabric in jar, pour dye in....oh no I'm almost out of non-iodized salt ( one of the key ingredience in the dye process) I have about half of what I needed....that should be good enough right???

Wait two hours and this is what I got... 

The fabric on the left has the right amount of salt, the fabric on the right does not.

 I now have a lot of beige fabric that is too dark for my quilt.

I can't dye anymore as I am out of salt, I can't go to town to buy any because my car battery is dead because I left the interior light on when the kid were vacuuming it out for me yesterday!!

So what did I do today?   I made a bag out of my leftover blocks that will one day hold my beach blanket :)

P.S. I used my redyed fabric to line the bag!