it's tea time...

Or so I thought! Let me backtrack a bit. When I made the first swatch and saw the shading that was going on because of different dye lots, especially on the stockinette swatch, I flashbacked to my very early years and recalled when I used to use steeped tea to dye my white bra to a nude/skin tone (I’m talking fifty years ago - you may have been able to buy nude tone bras at the time, but maybe not where I lived or maybe I didn’t have the extra cash to buy both a white and a nude bra) and it was pre-Martha Stewart! Anyway, now I had in the back of my mind that I could use tea to colour the two white shades to an ecru shade that would still give me the benefit of a non-colour that would go with anything. 

I did try it out on the original swatch (which was the same as the Back) and it looked very promising - even the acrylic yarn took the tea shade well, so I jumped in, let’s do this! Made my tea, 4 tea bags (orange pekoe black tea) in 4  cups hot water and let it steep for  an hour or so. Dumped that into my large soup pot and added enough warm water to more than enough to cover the garment. Swished it around several times, every ten minutes, let it sit for a couple of hours. Dumped it out, wrung the garment and put it in the washer with a bit of detergent, let it finish and tossed it in the dryer. Yikes! How could I go so wrong? I couldn’t even take a picture - it was all mottled, ugly and the Back was still distinctly much lighter than the other parts!

And I thought, oh freaking heck! I can’t show that to anyone! What the aich am I going to do? Next thing, here I am, madly googling, how to remove tea stains? Baking soda! Huh! Well, of course, I dreamt about it all night! Omg! May be I could just not say anything more and get into a new project…but I felt like that would be lying. 

Tried the baking soda, didn’t really do much but it is a little more even-looking, not quite as patchy. I’m going to live with it over the next few months and weigh my options. I could try that painting technique that I used for the tiger stripe thing https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2011/01/tiger-in-my-sweater.html ,  here’s the link to the finished product https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2011/01/minor-alterations-only.html   from way back or see how another go at the Woodstock thing https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2010/06/woodstock.html   painting would go…here’s the finished thing: https://knitwords.blogspot.com/2010/09/september-update.html