#maybe if i use bleach and then red rit?

[technicolorxsn]

just printed out some guides for stencils for a couple patches :D

[20dollarlolita]

20dollarlolita vs that one dress that I never washed, part 4:

In the previous episode, we discussed how the dress got into this state, treated it with an oxidizing stain remover, threw it in the washing machine with professional textile detergent, and concluded that it was better, but not good.

So, as we previously mentioned, sometimes stains won't come out. So, what do we do? We have a couple of options here:

1) we could remove the stains by releasing pigment from the cotton fibers the dress is made of, by some means such as bleach. This would be damaging to the print and the fibers of the dress, and is likely to ruin it

2) we could dye the entire dress another color, to mask the yellow. Assuming we put some kind of textile resist placed on the white areas of the skirt (which are actually white right now), and then un-sew and re-sew the lace, we could get a dress that doesn't look like it was just thrown in a vat of pink dye. This could be very effective, or could ruin the dress. It's about a 50/50 if you ask me. For a dress this nice, I'd also have to get good dye and all the additives, instead of just throwing it into a vat or Rit and letting what comes out come out.

3) we could accept this dress as it is, with all its flaws, and just make a point to never wear it with accessories that are stark white, and hope that the lighting makes it so no one notices.

All of those options are less than ideal.

So, let's take option 4: Laundry Blue.

Laundry blue is an ancient technique that makes yellowed, once-white clothing appear bright white. It's basically just Prussian Blue pigment, made so that it is soluble in water. You add it to your rinse cycle, and it adds blue pigment into your garment.

How does blue pigment make white clothes white? It's time for color theory.

A lot of people know color theory, but let's grab the color wheel anyway. When you pick two wedges of color on the color wheel, and you mix them together, they make the color that is the colors in between those colors. If you mix red and violet, you get that pink tone. If you mix yell and orange, you get that yellow-orange tone. But what happens when you mix colors opposite each other (complementary colors)? When you mix red and green, they make a neutral color (usually black).

But when you add in a lot of white and mix very light tints of these colors together, instead of getting black, you get a light neutral shade. If your tints are light enough, and you mix two colors that are opposite the color wheel, you get a gray color that is so light that our eyes see it as white.

That was really, really simplified, so if you're interested in this, please find more information and read up on it. It's very cool.

But that color theory, using colors opposite the color wheel to neutralize each other, is pretty common. That's why people with bleached blonde hair use purple shampoo. Bleaching your hair makes it more yellow than natural blonde hair is, so using purple shampoo makes it appear less yellow. Purple is opposite yellow, so purple pigment on yellow hair makes yellow hair closer to a white/gray tone.

So that's how laundry blue works. When you put blue pigment into yellowed fabric, it becomes less yellow, and closer to that white/gray color that our eyes see as white.

Now, some people are definitely wondering why it's "laundry blue" and not "laundry purple", if we're trying to remove yellow, and the opposite of yellow is purple. I'm glad you asked.

The answer is money. Actually, the answer is history. Actually, the answer is textile science. Maybe the answer is all three.

Purple dye, historically, has been one of the hardest dyes to make, and has been very expensive. This is why it's a color very heavily associated with wealth and royalty, even to this day.

Prussian blue, however, was a much less expensive dye. It was the first artificially manufactured color, and it was accessible and relatively inexpensive, when compared to the natural pigment used to make purple.

Blue is pretty close to purple on the color wheel, so it will neutralize yellows, just not as well as purple could. But people have been using laundry bluing for centuries, and no one's put out an inexpensive laundry purple, so let's keep working with what works.

Also, using blue-toned white as the "whitest" white is a tradition that started basically at the invention of Prussian blue. If you've ever played laser tag with a white shirt on, and found that your shirt glowed blue under the blacklight, that's the blue tint the manufacturers put into your shirt to make it look white. This is also why your teeth don't glow under blacklight, even if they're very white, unless you got them professionally whitened and they added blue pigment to it.

So, history out of the way, let's talk about why I don't want to dye this dress, but am okay with soaking it in water with blue pigment in it. See, laundry blue is inert. Dye chemically reacts with the fibers to place pigment into the fiber of the dress itself, so that the color will stay in the fabric even when it's washed. Laundry blue does not bind to the fibers of the dress at all. It just kind of sits on top of the fiber.

If we were using laundry blue to dye the fabric, this would be awful. You don't want bright pigments migrating from the fabric and onto your skin and related clothes. But the amount of laundry blue that you put into your clothes is so small, and so faint, that you can't even see if it migrates onto something else. All you do is put in enough pigment to make your eye think the fabric is not yellow. This will come out, but the next time you wash it, you can just put more in.

This brand of laundry blue is so inert that the only reason you can't drink it is that it wasn't manufactured in a sterile environment. Prussian blue is completely edible. And, I mean, spaghetti sauce is also completely edible, and I don't want to put that on my clothes, so maybe that's a less than ideal point. However, I don't want to put spaghetti sauce on my dress because it will stain my dress. I want to put laundry blue on my dress, because it will stain my dress (in a controlled, even way). Please don't eat laundry blue, but also know that you don't need to call poison control if you do eat it*.

So, let's go on with adding it.

______ *Please call poison control if you feel you need it. This blog is not intending to provide medical advice in any way whatsoever. While everything presented in this post is true as far as the writer knows it, the writer also majored in fucking costume design and is not a doctor in any way whatsoever and also legitimately thought seagulls in San Francisco were called bagels because they were by the bay until she was like TWENTY THREE YEARS OLD so she's probably the dumbest person to take medical advice from.

I start with a quart jar of cold water. The general rule is 1/8-1/4 tsp of blue for a load of laundry. I don't actually measure it anymore, because I know what color it makes the water when it's in the right amount.

If you have clothes that are white, and you just want to brighten them, you want to use the recommended amount of blue. If you're trying to remove a seriously yellow tint, you can go a little bit extra. If I'm trying to remove yellow from a blue garment, I will also go a little bit extra.

But this stuff is very concentrated. It's really easy to overdose and actually tint your garments blue. I rarely go over 1/4tsp (that's like 1.25ml), even for big jobs. If it doesn't do it the first time, I'll do it a second time. It's more work, but it's also more controlled this way.

(Yes, my dye sink is a mess, but that's because that sink is exclusively used for dyeing things. Dye gets places and it does not come out)

Do not, ever, just drip the blue into your hand-washing sink/bucket, your top-loading washer, or especially into your soap tray on your front-loading washer. It will not disperse properly, and it will give everything you wash--and, in the case of the front-loader, everything you wash for SEVERAL cycles--an uneven blue marbling. Get yourself a mayonaise jar and drip it into cold water.

I have a front-loading washing machine with a rinse-and-spin cycle, and with a soap tray that does not lock. Some machines will lock the tray so that it can't be opened during the cycle, and you'll have to find another system for that. I just wait until I can hear the machine running water through the soap tray, and then I open it just enough to dump my quart of water in there. When I can see that the water in the machine has turned a light blue, I know that the laundry blue got into it. If I dump the blue into the soap tray before starting the cycle, the full quart won't fit. Also, I think the machine actually dumps whatever is in the tray out on the rinse cycle, so that it doesn't accidentally add soap to the cycle, which is probably a good system but makes adding things to the rinse cycle a bit harder.

If you have a top-loading machine, set it for the agitation cycle, with no soap, and dump the blue in once the machine is half to completely full.

If you want to add the blue to a regular laundry cycle, you can do that, too. Just know when the rinse cycle starts, and be there to dump the blue in once the machine fills up with enough water.

If you're washing by hand, and want to add blue to your rinse cycle, I recommend soaping all the clothes, washing all the soap out, and then just dunking them in a basin of nothing but water and the laundry blue. You don't need to rinse them after this, just let them dry.

So, here's an armpit before and after I did stain-removing treatments. I don't have one that's specifically before and after the laundry blue was added, but you can see the progress.

Also, it's important to note, because the white areas of this dress were so yellowed, even after I went through all the oxidizing treatments and washing, laundry blue can't actually get them back to a bright white. It neutralizes the yellow color, but it doesn't lighten fabric at all. I got a pretty decent light gray, which I'll accept as good enough for now.

If anyone is curious, one of the reasons I used that professional textile detergent on this dress was that it preps the fabric for dyeing, and makes sure that the dye takes evenly. While adding laundry blue isn't dyeing, I did want to make sure there was nothing on the dress that could stop the laundry blue from settling on the fibers in an even way. I don't have ANY evidence that laundry blue will work better after the garment has been synthrapol'd, but it makes sense in my head, so I went with it.

This dress still needs some new elastic before it's done, but that's where we're going.