Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Thread Fail #1 Continued

Ok, I give up! I've tried putting my bleeding red edging through many, many soakings of vinegar with and without water, with and without salt. Also doused the water with the cleaner that takes stains out of old textiles. After all this and going through about a quart of white vinegar, there is still a small amount of dye bleeding out...unbelievable. This is worse than what I went through with setting dye in the turquoise and teal shawl I made last year. Straight vinegar and lots of it finally fixed that shawl, but this red thread has me defeated.

Luckily, I have another ball of size 10 red cotton thread on hand that looks slightly different. But expecting the same dye problem, I wet a sample of this thread and laid it on a paper towel to see if the dye would bleed out. No, nothing but wet paper towel. So I am going to redo the project using this batch of thread. The redo should go faster since I've already had a "practice run" of the pattern with the bleeding thread.

As for the first ball of thread...it's in the trash. Even though there was a lot of yardage left on the spool, I couldn't bear the thought of anyone else being cursed with this awful stuff. I just wish I still had its label so I would know what brand to avoid in the future. But since I acquired this thread in the 1990s, I'm thinking maybe this thread is no longer manufactured and that's a very good thing.

3 comments:

Madtatter80 said...

Good to see your fortitude and can't wait to see your new thread on an old idea!

Jane McLellan said...

Red can be a difficult colour to get fast. I bought two lots of red sheets that have resulted in all my underwear now being a pale pink colour! Best thing to throw that thread away.

Carolyn Kotlas said...

Amen, Jane! Thread is cheap, time is dear.