There are some things I love about older pieces including the fact that a lot of them are cotton or a poly-cotton blend vs fully polyester which depending on the print I prefer…but that comes with it’s risks as I have discovered recently. Sometimes the print will fade after too many washes, and sometimes the print will bleed! In 2020 I found BtSSB Border Scallop Hem Border Print JSK in black on an auction site for cheap. I had the skirt once upon a time but it was eventually too small for me but I still loved that print in that colorway (I still also have the navy tulle hem version!). When I received it though I realized why it was so inexpensive…the black dye was not colorfast! It was bleeding all into the white and pink parts of the dress in very noticeable spots. I was really disappointed when I saw it. Bleeding dye dresses was a somewhat mythical occurrence to me; I knew someone who knew someone that had a dress that ended up not being colorfast in the rain or wash but I had never experienced it myself. Even though I knew there were lots of people who had revived bleeding dresses in the past I had never had to deal with it and, for fear of ruining the dress further, I folded it and left it in a sad heap on the bottom of my closet.
It took me a year of procrastinating to finally realize- I’m not going to wear this dress in its current state so if I ruin it I still am not going to wear this dress so it’s really no loss if I just try to revive it…and if I do manage to revive it I will have an actually wearable dress to add to my collection! Additionally I had also started noticing that my red Fantasic Dolly skirt had been turning very pink in some of the polkadots- now I had two dresses that needed help and no first hand experience! Thus armed with RaineDragon’s Post http://www.rainedragon.com/raines-guide-what-to-do-if-the-dye-in-a-dress-bleeds/ , a purple laundry bucket, shout color catchers, a tub of Oxiclean, and the Baby JSK I took a day to sit on the edge of the tub and get desperately nervous, cold, and wet. It was not glamorous- I had perched a towel and old lumpy pillow on the edge of the tub for a more comfy spot, hiked up a single PJ pants leg out of the way of the water (too cold to do both legs), and made a colossal mess of the bathroom.
I actually forgot to take before and after pictures of this first attempt but once I let it dry I realized I hadn’t gone far enough and it still was bleeding all over the place, just not as badly. I repeated the process and this time I let the dress soak overnight in the Oxiclean mixture below are my results from the second pass!
I typed out this story in hopes that my success with this dress will bolster my resolve to tackle my next project: the Fantastic Dolly Skirt.
Instant update for you all but it’s been about a month for me since I revived the BtSSB JSK and tonight I decided to tackle the red Fantastic Dolly skirt! I feel like red is the bane of most lolitas who have had issues with prints running, at least I’ve heard the most horror stories with red in prints not being color fast even when the rest of the colors are fine. I own 3 Fantasic Dolly main pieces and of course the red one which I love for various themed coordinates (I’ve done both a Mini Mouse coord and a a ‘Sephora’ theme with it) and would be really hard to track down again in skirt form, since the skirt was not re-released, is the one that is not colorfast.
Armed again with my purple plastic tub, Oxiclean, color catcher sheets, and some new tools including a large measuring cup, spoon, a little more experience I dove in again!
The first step was flooding the loose dye out as much as I could as per Raine Dragons instructions in her post. I did this 7-9 times, I tried to keep track but it was so cold and in the beginning it seemed like I only filled the tub for less than a minute before the water turned too pink and I had to dump and start again. Similarly with the Oxiclean I felt like I had just mixed up a batch with my measuring cup and spoon when I had to turn around and dump the too-pink water and re-do. The water kept being so pink I was afraid it would stain the bathtub! After about ~6 rinses with the oxiclean it became apparent I was not going to have enough product left! I admit I panicked a little bit and Instacarted another tub of Oxiclean to the apartment since I didn’t want to leave the skirt just in case. Thankfully after 2 more rinses (and all the Oxiclean I had left) the Instacart order arrived and I was able to keep going!
I also baked a batch of brownies during this time since my nerves were getting the best of me and waiting without something to do with my hands was weighing on me. At least the apartment now smelled delicious!
(For extra fun halfway through this process my upstairs neighbors tub started leaking again and, as their apartment is laid out exactly like ours, the ceiling above our tub right where I was doing laundry started dripping in the corners…thankfully this meant no drips were getting into my purple bucket but was still one extra stress on top of regular lolita laundry nerves. This was truly a tub laundry roller coaster adventure!!)
I ended up doing 1 more Oxiclean tub that I dumped after a few hours then did another for an overnight soak as the water was still not clear but it was much much lighter!
It was really hard to get pictures of the water and the process since I was wet, cold and nervous! I did take a picture of the incredibly pink color catcher sheets at some stage seen here:
The next day the skirt looked really good so I rinsed it 3 times in plain water and smooshed it flat on a few towels before laying it flat on my drying rack. Several hours later I checked on it and the skirt looked mostly great…except there’s bit at the top of the waistband you can kind of see here
Disappointing but the still slightly damp skirt goes back into the Oxiclean bath!
The kind of annoying part of this process is the waiting several hours between dumping and refilling if the water isn’t clear yet mixed with my anxiety still that somehow inexplicably even though I’ve done this many times now its going to be this time I’m going to ruin the garment.
Here’s the before and after! Again it’s hard to photograph but in person it looks so much better:
The moral of this story is that even though I kinda messed up both times and didn’t go far enough it ended up fine! If I can revive multiple dye bleeding dresses you can too! Do you have any laundry you’ve been putting off because of anxiety? Do you have any experience with items bleeding? Any other tips for if there’s a next time or for me or future readers?
No comments:
Post a Comment