The Summer Dye Job

 

            Every summer, it seems the warmer weather drives me to dye something -- something that needs new life.  This year's project started back in June.  J told me -- two days in advance of her Sports Day -- that she was on the Yellow Team and needed to wear yellow.    She held up a pair of yellow leggings I'd made her in the winter: "Can you make these into shorts or capris?"

            I laughed.   It only took a few minutes and the leggings did get made into capris.  And quite frankly, I was glad they were finally getting used.   For Christmas, I'd made her and her Dad matching long-sleeve shirts.  Then J got leggings and Joel got a pair of shorts.  All of them were made out of these high quality, warm knit I'd found on sale.   Daughter and Dad loved their shirts and regularly wore them.  Not so with the yellow bottoms, which, let's face it, yellow just gets dirty too quickly. 

 I suggested to J that we find a more practical colour for her capris after Sports Day.  She agreed and chose royal blue.  We bought the dye together along with the powdery solution to take the yellow dye out.  In the back of my closet, I found a cotton sweater a friend had passed on to add to the dye pot. 
       But the bottom pieces of the leggings missed the pot to pull out the yellow dye.  J and I had also thought it would be kind of fun to have blue leggings with pink bottoms.  

 You can see that J took dying the bottom pieces very seriously.  And she's even wearing the required apron.

    But in the end, we both agreed that the resulting salmon pink clashed with the beautiful royal blue.  So we stuck with the capris and Mom didn't need to sew the bottoms on again!

B

The blue capris and shorts are getting much more use than their former yellow selves.

 

And I love my new cotton sweater.  I added a daisy brooch.  It covers a stain I missed on the original sweater before it was dyed.  The daisy brooch cost me less than a dollar.  I bought a flower on sale at Michael's; took out it's stiff plastic parts and added a yellow button from my stash.