Tie dyed bedsheets: Fixing a botched-up dye job

Well, we have had an eventful few weeks. First we had to take my little boy to the ER twice, first because of a bad fall right on his face on asphalt strewn with gravel (much of which got lodged up under his skin. I will spare you the story of my picking pieces out with my tweezers. Ick!), and second because of a stitch removal gone bad, which led to the wound being opened right up again. Then during his recovery he also got the chicken pox. And then my mother and her husband arrived from the United States to visit us. (That part of the eventful is considerably nicer!) Anyway, my point is, I have been busier than usual for these and other reasons. So today I have a very simple project for you that doesn’t require much in terms of explanations.

We have a bunch of boring white bedsheets. And sometimes they get stained while hanging out on the line. I think it’s the wooden clothespins, but I’d hate to switch to plastic so I just keep using them anyway. So this bottom sheet had these yucky yellow-ish/brown-ish stains on it and I decided to just dye them in the washing machine. (Don’t pay any attention to the stained towel in the picture. I decided at the last minute not to dye it because I thought there was already too much fabric for the amount of dye as it was.) Have you ever machine-dyed? You know that part about getting the fabric wet beforehand? Well, I discovered why. If it’s all more or less uniformly damp, the dye will soak in evenly. If the dye touches dry fabric, it will soak in like crazy in that spot, making that part much darker and leaving the others less colored. I thought I’d gotten the sheets nice and damp, but I guess that the bottom sheet had some dry parts still, because my dye job came out pretty bad-looking.

See?

Here you can see where more dye got soaked up by the fabric.

There were also white spots that looked like dried on drool or boogers. Yuck. This was not the effect I had been going for at all.

So I got myself another package of the same color of dye, was very careful to get all of the fabric damp, folded up the sheets accordion-style to tie-dye them, stretched numerous rubber bands around them and popped everything into the washing machine.

This time it went considerably better. The original bad dye job is not totally covered up, but is much more camouflaged. I like the way the non-dyed parts are a lighter shade of the dye color as opposed to the original white. Unfortunately the elastics on the fitted sheet (which had been harder to fold up because of the elastic corners) came off partway through the washing cycle, so it didn’t come out with a very defined design.

But both the top sheet…

…and the pillowcase came out great.

There are even little faces hidden in the tie dye job, which of course my daughter loves.

Well, actually, she loves everything about these sheets! And I’m thrilled that I managed to fix my fix! This was only my second go at tie dying (my first was my pool bathrobe) and I’m far from being an expert, but the nice thing about it is that it still looks cool even if it’s not perfect!