from pink silk to ivory!

it worked! man, i hope google can pick up on some key words in here because anyone wondering if they can use a color remover to change that silk they thought was a nice ivoryish but is actually a strange beige/pinkish to the ivory they thought it originally was should know that THEY CAN!

so. i've been on this insane lace hunt, we all know. last weekend r and i went on the Great Fabric Adventure to LA's fashion district. and it was so fabulous! i should post one of the quick phone pics i got. so i found some fantastic lace at a great price and figured what the hell, might as well grab the silk at the same time. the lace is distinctly ivory and so i needed a silk to go with that. i got what appeared to be a very nice match at what was also a very nice price and was quite happy. until i got in the car. i looked and looked and checked in different lights but it was not to be denied: my lovely ivory silk was definitively off-pink. no getting around that. oh, suck.

so i started looking into color removers. i never had any thought of using anything like clorox bleach, which i learned was a very good thing because apparently chlorine + silk = disaster. i don't know what happens, exactly, but good to know. but there are a couple of other products out there: specifically, i was looking at jacquard idye color remover. it's formulated for, among other things, silk. but when i went to joann today, all they had was rit's version. which was fine. i hadn't specifically read anything about it and i was a little nervous cause it seemed like it was more geared toward specifically dealing with bleeds... but what to lose? $2.50? so i brought it on home and fired up a test strip of the silk.

it was looking good. good enough that i decided yes, i am definitely putting the whole shebang into that pot (yay for r having a big enamel pot from brewing beer!).

seriously, it is fantastic. amazingly fantastic. i mean, it came out better than i could possibly have imagined. it is exactly what i wanted when i didn't even know exactly what i wanted. and having dried & ironed the test strip, the texture is not ruined in the slightest by simmering for 13 minutes in chemical-infused water. i have my ivory silk!!

the colors are both so subtle that it was almost impossible to get a good comparison picture, but i think this pretty well captures it. although you don't get the sense of what these colors really are, you can see just how much lighter the one on the right is. the change was remarkable. and i am sooooo happy with the final result. so the lesson is: will rit color remover change my light pinky beige silk to a light cream? YES IT WILL!