Sad beige fabric & how I fixed it

I’m going to tell you a true store and then I’m going to wrap up with what I learned from it.

A few weeks back a fabric store which I had only used once before had a 50% sale, I even checked with the owner to make sure her account wasn’t hacked! Sure enough the sale was real. The first time around I had ordered 1.5 yards of this beautiful Sequoia jersey fabric. It is milled in the US and the quality is outstanding. It is really beautiful. It took 2 weeks to get it, longer than usual but they advertised that they did in fact take between 7 to 10 days to fill in an order and although I like to have my fabric right away I was ok waiting.

The online store had another 50% off sale and I thought to myself well I really would love to order some more things (hello Marlo sweater!!) and the quality was great and what I got was as shown so… I should be ok. This is were today’s title come into play.

I waited a month for my order, they got a lot of orders… I mean hey! Half off sale I’m sure lots of people ordered.

So… I ordered 2.5 yards of “Lilac” French Terry and 1 yard of “Raisin” Rib Knit, couldn’t wait to get my hands on it.

I’m afraid that what I got…. was this:

Which to my eyes is vastly different from what I ordered and was shown online. Hence why I called this title sad beige fabric because it reminds me of those parents that dress their kids in sad beige clothes. Moral of the story when your gut tells you to order a swatch…. ORDER a swatch!

I was a tad disappointed but I really liked the fabric, the quality is quite nice but the color is way off. So I decided to roll up my sleeves and learn about dying fabric. I knew that trying to dye on top of this color was going to result in more brown or darker fabric so I had to remove the color first using Rit Dye Color Remover. I had to do this twice! I ended up with a very light sage color, so it tells me that was the base fabric that was used.

Next I went ahead and used an Eggplant All Purpose Dye because I knew the fabric content was cotton and clearly the little dye they added from the fabric manufacturer didn’t really add in any visible purple / lilac hues. Or they did and it just wasn’t enough. So I was going to have to go with a vivid purple / violet dye. I added salt to the dye bath along with dish washing soap so the fabric absorbed the dye a little more. Ten minutes per garment of stiring hot water with dye…..

It’s not perfect, it’s not the exact color I was looking to get, but I am happy to say I will at least get to use this fabric.

Let me remind you one more time about the moral of this story….. when in doubt, order a swatch! It will save you time, money and disappointment. But not all the time it works out… even when you order a swatch.