It's Friday!! I love fridays. I used to have a whole friday happy dance back when I worked in an office. No, I won't do the friday happy dance for you, I have to be inspired. Now that I don't go to an office every day, I'm not sure why I still love fridays, but seriously - I do. On this particular friday I am feeling a little more fun and colorful than usual - do you know why?? It's because I'm wearing my brand new, fancy, green pants! Oh yeah. I am embracing the pastel craze. Embracing may actually be a strong term. I am testing the waters on the pastel craze - sort of the same way I am testing out the neon craze. They both make me nervous, but I'm trying to make it work.
I think what pushed me over the edge into the pastel phenomenon was a pin from The Little Giggler (she's super cute -ps). She made such a cute pair of pastel pink jeans and I figured it couldn't be that hard. Because I have had some Rit dye disasters in the past, I did a little more research and found another tutorial from Rit and also made sure to look at their color chart. That is where things may have gone slightly awry. I wanted to make a cute pair of mint jeans so I wrote down that I needed to pick up some green and aquamarine dye. I failed to realize that I needed kelly green not apple green. OOPS. I could tell you it was all of the distractions in the store or the fabric mystery (a story I shall save for another day) or the fact that I always feel as though I am shopping with half a brain when I have Macie in a craft store, but really -- I just screwed it up!
I was at Miranda's house for the day, working on some other fun projects (they're good - keep an eye out!) and so we thought the jeans would be easy enough to knock out at the same time. Ha. Perhaps not. Let's just say - don't multi-task when it comes to dye.
After reading the instructions two or three times, I dove in. On Rit it there is a color guide that is based on one ounce fabric. Because of this, you need to weigh your jeans and find out how many ounces they are. Weird right? I threw my capris on a food scale and figured out the dye ratio for my color. My jeans weighed 13.5 ounces so I needed 1/4 C. of apple green and 1/8 C. of aquamarine with 1 C of salt and 2 C of hot water. The color was darker than I wanted because I had messed up and bought apple green instead of kelly green so I threw a little extra of the aquamarine in. I say that super casually but really it went something like this:
Jamie: It's not the right color!
Miranda: Add more blue
Jamie: Do you think it will work? Should I??
Miranda: DO IT!!!! YOU HAVE TO SAVE THEM!!
Jamie: AGHHHH!!! Am I screwing it UP?!?!?!
We may be a tad dramatic. After breathing a little, I added the dye to a bucket of hot water (about 3 gallons) and mixed it up and threw the (wet) jeans in the bucket. They started getting dark pretty quick and I started to panic. I didn't even use gloves -- I may have the green hands to prove it. I mixed the jeans in the bucket, the instructions say to stir for at least 20 minutes - after 10 minutes I got nervous and pulled them out because I didn't want them to get too dark. After rinsing the jeans in cool water until the water runs clear and being SUPER nervous about the whole thing - they went into the washer ... and we waited. It was a tad nerve wracking but in the end --
I got some green jeans! They aren't quite as minty as would have liked, they are more pistachio-y (I use ice cream to describe colors, don't you??) I'm branching out - I'm feeling the pastel vibe. What do you think? Am I rocking the pastel? Do I blend in with the grass a little too much?
