Stupid, stupid, stupid

Yup, that's me.
I had this crazy idea that I could dye this fabric without taking it off the rolls.
My husband said "no way".
My friend Chris said "don't think so".
But I had to try it.
First I weighed the rolls, I needed 20 lbs of fabric dyed a olive green.
Now these gloves look all professional, but in reality, they are useless. Stay tuned.

The powdered dye was a coral color, but it really is olive green, actually it is called celery, not sure why. It is a MX reactive dye for cotton from Pro Chemical. They have a great site, and they even have directions. Of course, none of those included dyeing fabric in rolls.
Three teaspoons of dye per 2 cups of water is enough for 1 lb of material. Get out the paper and pen, do some calculating to get it right.
I had to put all this salt in the water first, and mix it thoroughly.
I use this rubber tub that my husband bought for me at Tractor Supply. I just filled it with the hose. Today was a really warm, sunny day, a "perfect day to dye".

I started mixing the dye in the kitchen, then moved out to the back yard.
This is the soda ash......which I also mixed with water after the fabric had been in the dye bath for a while.
OK, here we are......putting 20 lbs of rolls in the dye......but of course they wouldn't stay submerged, so I had to innovate. My husband had just brought some bricks over from our back yard at home, so I used them to weight down the rolls.
This roll of fabric.......this is what I SHOULD have done......what do they say about hind sight being 20/20. Yeah.
Had I spent the time to unwind all those rolls into balls, while annoying at the time, I would have been done with this dyeing project in a couple of hours.
But I had to know if this would work. And I found out. It doesn't.
The fabric is just wound so tight, the dye could not completely seep through. When I unwound one, about half way into it, the original color and the dyed fabric were about 50/50. Not good.

By this time, the gloves had ripped, my nails were stained, and I had splashed it on my pants. And I realized that I needed to unwind all this fabric from the rolls, and rewind it into balls. Which I did. It took a lot longer than I care to divulge at this time. And by the time I was finished, my pants, my socks, my shoes, my hands, and one arm to the elbow were a lovely shade of olive.
And the fabric was not yet the color I wanted.
So I decided to take yet another chance.
If I took the fabric out of the tub to rinse, I would have 20 lbs of fabric the wrong shade of green, so I figured I didn't have much to lose by leaving it in the dye all night.
So that is where it is. Weighted down with a couple of boards and bricks.
In the morning, I will rinse it all, and hang it on a clothes rack outside to dry.
And while it is drying, I will be upstairs weaving the last towel on the Macomber.
A prospect that looks like a whole lot more fun than what I did today.
And little Ava is coming to visit her Mimi, and her little face is guaranteed to make me smile.