I Dyed: Part 2

So for the rest of the story that my attention span was too short to cover earlier:

Since my back patio died, and I didn't feel like doing it out front and then explaining to my neighbors why their children are blue, I went to my Mom's. Also, she has a garden hose for rinsing.

Okay, so I mentioned that I used dye, but hopefully you realized that it would be below me to dye it all one color. I used wide masking tape to make a nifty little pattern.

Here's the other crazy thing about Rit: it can dye bathtubs. If I wasn't in a rental I would try it. Instead I used every burner on my mom's stove to boil water, and poured them all into a 5 gallon bucket.

I tried my best to evenly dump the bucket on the rug. Here's how that went:

Then it started raining so my mom and I drug it over by the side of the house (because I forgot that it would get really heavy when wet). I left it there for a month.

The next time I went over I came armed with 2 boxes of dye. Instead of dumping it from the bucket, I hand ladled it (which is why my hands turned blue). There were still white spots, so in the end I bought two more boxes, and this time I ladled the dye into my mom's spray bottle (love you mom!) for a nice, even coat. In the end I got it all covered, and ended up with a sore muscle in my wrist from prolonged repeated spritzing.

Time for step 2: second hand blanket + hot glue.

Lots of hot glue. Like 10 sticks of hot glue.

And here's the shocker the hot glue has held together for the past month. And the masking tape worked surprisingly well, although it would have been better if I hadn't pulled it off after coat 2 and tried to put it back on before coat 3.

*Moral of the Story*
Hot glue works BUT now that I know about Rit, it would have been about a million times easier to just buy an ugly floral rug at Goodwill and have at it. ALSO, in the end I used 5 boxes of dye, and the color would have been more consistent if I had done it all at once without letting it dry in between. ALSO, wear rubber gloves.

Here's the post about the bookshelf if you missed it.