I knitted a baby blanket with bone-colored organic cotton. Since I did not have enough to make the blanket as big as I wanted it, I added a red border with Luna cotton yard: one skein per side. The dye on one side of the red border ran when I washed the blanket in cool water. Now a part of the bone section - just a few rows but enough to be noticed - is a light pink color. Any suggestions on how I can fix this? One person at the yarn store said to bleach the affected area by brushing bleach on it, another said to dye the entire blanket & fix the dye job with vinegar. The third person said not to worry. What can I do? I’m concern that the red dye will continue to run. Thanks for the help.
I honestly don’t think it’s fixable. I know people who’ve tried those dye grabber things in the wash and it still ran. If you won’t use it or consider it a loss as it is then you could try the bleach. No telling how it’ll react with the bone color though it might turn white.
Ooooh, :noway: so sorry to hear this happened. You might try the bleach that is meant for colors so as not to turn the bone to white.
If that doesn’t work, I’d dye the entire blanket pink.
Hope you can make something work that you are happy with.
Hugs.
Thank you for the good advise. It’s a baby present so I need to start over asap. This one I can give it to my sister for when our nephews come over. How can I assure that the dye in another project is color safe? Up to now I’ve only knitted in one color but I would like to mix the colors in the future. Staying away from mixing dark and light colors does not seem like a good solution.
Dark and light do seem to be a problem. Red seems to be the worst, but I’m sure other dark colors can bleed, too. I think I’d stick to more like colors.:shrug:
Maybe wash the skein of yarn first? I don’t know how much that will help with cotton though. I made myself a cotton washcloth with red/white/blue multi (one skein). I’ve used it several times now and it always runs some when I squeeze it out, mostly see the blue running, but I can tell the red has tinged some of the white. But because of it’s design it looks okay like that.
All I can suggest is to do some colorfastness tests or maybe try some other natural fibers like wool, bamboo, alpaca (hypoallergenic) and soy.