As anyone who has fallen down the spinning 'rabbit-hole' has probably discovered, when one gets involved in a 'hobby' that others they know are passionate about, generosity often abounds and occasionally stuff just seems to show up on your doorstep. With spinning, it's usually some sort of delicious fiber, but with babies, it's often clothes and toys. Sometimes it's clothes for you (and really, god bless the gifted and/or hand-me-down maternity clothes. They're a life-saver.), and sometimes it's stuff for the wee bairn. We have had the fantastic good fortune of having really amazing friends and family with lots of kid stuff and, usually, not a lot of storage space. So, when we announced that we were pregnant, many of our friends and family seemed to ecstatically come forth with a plethora of wonderful, wonderful things for us (Oh man, not to mention the FANTASTIC and unbelievably useful stream of tips and advice. Not kidding here, it's been utterly invaluable.), and we have been, quite honestly, overwhelmed by this generosity. We will not discuss the misty-eyed gratitude and excitement, lest things get overly-sappy around here, nor will we discuss the amount of time that we have spent playing with Weebeastie's new toys ourselves, because that would just be unseemly. Or something.
Instead, we will talk here today about the joy of rejuvenating or re-purposing kid's clothes. One of the things we've received is a ton of GREAT clothes, most in perfect condition - here's where that growing-too-fast-to-wear-out-the-clothes thing pays off for the next kid in line. This is also where the gender-neutral thing pays off for us, because I'm certain that I'm planning to put this little guy in stuff that his dad would never buy for him, if you know what i mean. Occasionally, however, we've received some perfectly useful, even lovely, clothes that maybe have a teensy bit of food staining, or maybe they're just too girly for me to be able to overcome dad's objections. Enter: a bottle of RIT dye, the dye pot, some fun fabric prints and some fusible web.
One Saturday, while we were doing a whole bunch of other work on the house, I literally threw a handful of clothes into the dye pot with a bottle of Navy RIT dye, stirred for a bit (like...5 minutes, just to make sure everything was saturated) and then walked away for an hour or so. Now, mind you, I know that the bottle says to stir constantly, but I just wasn't going to do that, so ....you know....should you try this, I would never recommend that you do anything other than what's in the directions on the bottle, etc., etc., etc., blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I didn't have time (or inclination) to stir them, so I didn't. Please don't report me to the crafting/dyeing police.
Then, once I'd pulled out the first batch to drain and cool in the sink, there still seemed to be a TON of blue dye left in the water, so I figured, what the heck, I'll do another batch. How bad can it be, really? If it sucks, I can always just get another bottle of dye and redo them, right? RIGHT. And it worked! Once the rinsing was all done (I just ran them through the rinse cycle in the machine a couple of times until the water ran clear), I got one batch of almost perfectly uniformly dyed navy blue stuff, and one batch of just lightly splotchy denim-blue stuff. The denim-blue actually turned out to be my favorite, just because it's so damned cute. It turns the plain onesie into something sort of hip and fun and shabby-chic, and makes them look like your favorite faded jeans. Here, look:
Aren't they the cutest? I would have been happy to stop there, and did for most items, but a few things had stuff on them that maybe needed disguising. For instance, the onesie on the left has the phrase "Daddy's Little Princess" printed on it. Now, the father of the house is pretty liberal, it's true, but I was pretty sure he'd draw the line at that, so out came some stashed fish print fabric (from the clearance bin), the scissors, and the fusible web. LITERALLY less than 10 mins later, voila.....instant, machine-washable cuteness.
Just wait 'til his onesies are big enough for the pin-up girls.
