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I Need a Chaperone

So a while ago, as I was working on eyelets for the green silk bliaut underbodice and...eyeing my remaining button thread, I thought I might run out before I'd finished. Well, I thought, I'll just save future-Sabine some time and fetch more before I run out, and then I won't have to be cranky about being two eyelets from done and running out and it being too late to get more.

A single spool of white thread, isolated on a bright floral quilt with yellow, turquoise, peach, terracotta, hot pink, and black prints.
I love my gloriously bright quilt.
I got the thread! Was very successful at getting it, in fact.

Two hanks of red embroidery floss, a spool of navy thread, and two cards of three silver shank buttons each stacked on a folded piece of off-white dotted fabric and a larger folded piece of red, blue, and white patterned striped fabric.
Oops.
So successful that I came home with fabric, thread, buttons, and floss for a whole new outfit. Some assembly required. This is why my budget is a shambles. The off-white dotted possibly-cotton-but-probably-plastic was two dollars for 1.5 yards, though, and it's a lovely weight for a light shirt, and then I was completely taken with the stripey cotton and had a sudden vision of a Regency/1920s-inspired jumper with clever details using the grainline in different directions, and then there were these cute little buttons that would be perfect for decorating the front closure, and...well. It cost much less than a constructed new outfit would have!

I got up to the cutting counter and noticed a flaw in my clever plan. The off-white shirt fabric is off-white. The stripey cotton features a blinding optic white. It makes the shirt fabric look dirty. I dithered, and then I remembered: I am a tea-based organism, and tea has lots of other uses.

A large white box of tea, with a simple red teacup illustration and a photo of the tea bag diving into disturbingly viscous brown liquid. The box brags about containing 100 Tea Bags without tags, and a small orange owl at the top right corner says "Psst...big savings... pass it on." You know they're big because the esses in 'psst' are dollar signs.
I now have an awful lot of tea.
Including that it is a fantastic dye/mordant all in one, and perfect for dulling the gleaming white of many printed fabrics to something less blinding, without making the colors tragically dull.

A photo from above of crumpled fabric with red, blue, and white patterned stripes, just submerged in water in a grey tote.
Many odds and ends of yarn were displaced to free up this tub for dyeing.
I skimmed read a few blog posts on the subject, remembered that all dyes are more likely to strike evenly if the fabric involved is wet first, and emptied a plastic tub to use as my dye container. The fabric had plenty of time to soak while I heated up a few gallons of tea. I only wanted to dull the white a little bit, so I did a few tests by dipping scrap muslin in my saturated dye bath, and worked out that about 45 seconds in a half-strength bath would be plenty for this fabric.

I drained most of the water from the plastic tub before pouring in the tea bath, and stirred and squished and squidged and generally roughed up the fabric as much as I could, to get the tea bath distributed evenly throughout the yardage.

A bundle of sopping wet fabric with patterned red, blue, and white stripes, held on a thick dowel and draping into a grey tote half-full of thin tea.
Did you know tea foams? I did not.
I hauled the dyed fabric out of the bath with a stick left over from some other project, wrung it to "less dripping", and draped it over my shower head to wait.

A crumpled pile of bright salmon pink Swiss dotted fabric.
Speaking of obnoxious.
While I'd been dyeing, it had occurred to me that I have a few other fabrics I wouldn't mind dulling down just a bit, and if the dye didn't take, it certainly wouldn't harm them. I stuck the pink Swiss dot and some screaming green probably-fake-linen in a pot of water to dampen them, and tossed them into the dye bath together.

A photo from above of bright green fabric submerged in thin brown tea in a grey tote, with a dowel sitting in the lower left corner of the tote.
It turned green!!! Nah, I'm just terrible at planning posts in my head while I'm stirring fabric in a plastic tub.
I didn't keep track of the time for these, just swished them around periodically until I was bored. The green appeared untouched, but the pink might be a little richer. Most of the color difference is due to it being soaked, though.

A mixed pile of screaming pink, bright green, and patterned striped red, blue, and white fabrics, partially submerged in water in a grey tote.
All together now!
I pitched the leftover tea and refilled the tub with enough water to rinse my fabrics, then hung them all up to drip-dry until I could take them to the laundromat for a trip through the dryers to set the dye.

Sopping wet fabric with patterned red, blue, and white stripes looped over a plain showerhead, so the striped run in rough diagonals descending rightward. The molded shelves in the shower hole a blue razor, a pink bar of soap, and a few bottles of shampoo and conditioner.
That shower head is probably the only sturdy thing in my bathroom.
I wish I could say otherwise, but the shower surround is really that yellow in person. Possibly even more so; the light in there is Not Great.

Neatly folded fabric with patterned red, blue, and white stripes, stacked on neatly folded off-white fabric with subtle, narrow sheer strips and Swiss dots.
Very subtle change, but the whites are no longer clashing.
So, in between all the other projects happening this month, I'm hoping to get this closer to a finished garment. Right now the fabric is in a pile in a corner of the conservatory, waiting to be sorted and put away like the other in-progress things.

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