Well, I tried bleaching the Patonyle on the weekend with absolutely no success at all. My samples didn’t even go grey. If anything, they’ve gone kind of plasticy, as if they’re partially melted. So it’s true wool and bleach don’t mix.
Then yesterday I did some hand washing, which included my koigu ribble socks. They didn’t appear to lose much colour as I washed them – just turned the water ever so slightly pink – so I chucked them in with the rest of the hand washing in the machine to spin out the excess water.
When I took everything out, my off-while hand made transylvanian peasant top (part of a costume I wore during my weekend away) was covered in varying shades of purple and red dye.
Wierdly, nothing else had picked up the dye. Not the white, blue and green cotton top. Not the pale green cotton skirt. Not the blue sarong. Just the peasant top.
So I set about bleaching the stains out. First I tried White King. It made very little difference. This was one tough stain. I dug around in the bathroom cupboard and found some pre-soak stuff in among the laundry stuff the beau had ‘accumulated’ in the last ten or fifteen years. I soaked it overnight and the stains paled to the colour of tea. Now I’ve put it in for another soak with fresh pre-wash, hoping I can get those last brown smudges out without dissolving the top into non-existance.
The lesson for today, kiddies, is DON’T PUT KOIGU SOCK YARN IN WITH THE REST OF YOUR CLOTHES EVEN IF YOU’RE JUST SPINNING EXCESS WATER OUT. They might not look as if they’re losing colour, but somehow that dye will find it’s way onto your clothes. And somehow it will selectively pick the garment you least wanted stained.
Or it could just be that I’m an idiot.
So Sorry to hear about the bleech episode. When I used to braid rugs from wool material – I used to take the black wool material, put it in a pot of hot water on the stove, add some soap, and the color would bleed out to over dye what ever other material I wanted – I never used bleech, because that didn’t produce the bleeding effect. The Soap was the trick.
Hmm, there’s an idea. You’d have to be really careful not to felt the wool, of course.
Have had similar experiences with the Patonyle i dyed myself with Landscape dyes – the purple pair only bleeds on G’s business shirts! These days I save up handknitted socks for a few days and wash them altogether in one Wool wash.