I'm sure there are people out there who are partial to this colour, and can even look good wearing garments made in it. I am not one of those people. So you can imagine how delighted I was to find the label confirming that The Mustard was definitely cotton. Why? Because - at least theoretically - cotton will take a dye.
Clinging to the possibilities offered by a dye packet, I decided to bite the bullet and use some of The Mustard to make myself a top. If the dye was successful, then the remaining spools would become a useful resource for future projects. If not.. well, I'd cross that bridge when I came to it.
After a bit of browsing, I decided to go for this tank top pattern, which seemed fairly straightforward. I didn't want to spend too long making something that might end up a blotchy dye disaster. In fact, it's a ridiculously easy pattern, as far as tops go. If you can do a double crochet, you can make this.
Mustard was surprisingly nice to work with. The combed strands were not nearly as inclined to tangling or loose threads as I expected, and it's pleasantly soft to the touch.
On my next visit to Lincraft, I stood musing in front of the dye stand for some time. I'd never dyed anything before, so I didn't really know what to look for. I selected a mid blue and checked out the instructions.
For "strong colours", the use of a pre-wash to remove the current colour was recommended. Otherwise, "colour-mixing rules apply e.g. red+blue=purple". I wondered if mustardy yellowish brown counted as a 'strong colour', but since they didn't seem to have any of the pre-dye on sale, that wasn't an option anyway. So going by "colour-mixing rules", what do you get when you mix blue with mustard? Hmm. I experimented with a couple of conveniently similar-coloured felt pens when I got home, and came up with a sort of bluish green. I reckoned I could live with that.
Of course, that's not what happened at all.
I took the dye sachet home, made up the dye bath as per the instructions, and placed the mustard top in the liquid. It didn't take long before I knew that neither the blue nor a bluish green were a likely result. The Mustard was still showing strongly through a dingy greyish tint, which didn't get any darker as time went on.
Further surprises were to come, however. When the dyeing time was up, I took the top out to rinse it. Every bit of the dye came out in the rinse: my tank top was exactly the same colour as it was before. My fingers, in contrast, had successfully taken on the expected shade of blue. (The instructions did say to wear gloves, a point that I briefly noted and then forgot about. I am not likely to forget that again).
While my delightful mustard tank top dried on a rack nearby, I sat and pondered my next move in battling that which I had now mentally dubbed "The Undyeing Mustard". The best plan seemed to be to get my hands on some of the recommended pre-dye. If I could leech the original dye out of the fibres, they might be more amenable to taking on a new colour.
A trip to Spotlight supplied me with the pre-dye, which removes the colour by means of boiling. After the first few minutes on the boil, I could see that it was working: The Mustard was getting lighter. The final result was a sort of sad beige - a much better canvas for taking dye than the original colour. I had to ensure all of the pre-dye had washed out before sticking it into a new dye. Since the top had already come through one washing machine cycle unscathed, I figured the easiest way to get it clean was to put it through the machine again.
I can't be sure whether it was the long boiling and stirring, or the agitation and spinning of the washing machine, but what I finally retrieved from the machine was a matted, stretched, misshapen version of my original top. This was disappointing, but I had to hope I could block it into usable shape after the final dye. In any case, I wasn't about to give up - I had to know whether the dye would work this time!
The new dye was a different brand, which offered various dye methods to choose from. Since the pre-dye had worked so well, I decided to use the boiling method for the dyeing as well. I'd chosen black this time - the darkest colour possible, in the hope that I could at least get a grey out of it.
It worked, albeit in a slightly unexpected fashion. While the top was in the pot, it was sporting a quite appealing steel grey shade. I was perfectly happy with that. When it came to the rinse, the colour started washing out again. Not all of it this time though - the colour I got from a black dye turned out to be a lightish blue.
Unfortunately, further boiling, stirring, rinsing and squeezing had not helped the matted misshapenness of the garment. The neckline was stretched well out of shape and the hem had an unevenly frilled effect. In places, the shell stitches were matted together while elsewhere the stitches had gaped widely. I did my best to manipulate the top back into shape, pinned it in place and crossed my fingers as it dried. This affected some small improvement, but sadly not enough to make for a wearable garment. It was just too stretched and shapeless.
Refusing to admit defeat, I patiently unpicked the whole top, soaked and hung the resulting skeins in an unsuccessful attempt to remove the crinklyness, then wound it all up into balls and started again.
The No-Longer-Mustard, used and abused by means of boiling, dyeing, stitching, and frogging, was not nearly as nice to work with as before. Stripping the dye from the yarn had also stripped it of its silkiness. The strands would not run smoothly through my fingers. It took much longer to make the top a second time.
Still, I'm happy. Who would have thought I'd get something wearable out of that mustard?
