At the okay, coral

So I had this silk dress. Classic style. Got it online at a huge sale several years ago for all of I think ten bucks and hoped it wouldn’t be quite how it turned out that yes, it was. I almost liked the color enough. (The first photo totally nails it on my monitor.) It would have looked great on me when the chemo drug for Crohn’s was messing with my skin tone, but I’ve been off that med five years now.

And I just didn’t quite.

And now today, at last, I do.

I got my biggest dye pot out this afternoon and had the Jacquard simmering and stirring away a few minutes before I added the dress, no lumps of vermillion allowed.

And then I did something I would never do with, say, a merino sweater: I went at it with two for-dyeing-only wooden spoons close to nonstop the entire half hour it was on the stove, pushing, pulling, dunking, swirling, poking, stirring, making sure neither dress nor dye stood still at all. I tried lifting it out a few times to let any lines resettle (forget it, I’m not tall enough) and then swished around hard some more.

It came out with no streaks, no spots, no unevenness (that’s a camera artifact along the right)–it all took completely evenly. I am amazed at how thoroughly I lucked out. It’s not as pink as this photo says and the silk most definitely needs a good steam ironing to live up to itself again–but that’s all it needs.

Now, I know full well there are going to be some looking at the before and afters and thinking man, she sure got those backwards. But light orange with a hint of taupe vs a calm coral, for me it just totally validated that purchase at long last.

I’d always known I could change it if I didn’t love it. I just had to want to enough. Enough to risk making mistakes.

And even then, Jacquard is a reversible dye–you can boil most of it back out if it’s bad enough to want to.

Totally perfect. And even the not-silk stitching still looks good on it.