I am dye-ing to change that!

Blah! When we moved into this house, I hated those mauve drapes. However, you are poor when you are a young couple, buying a house and everything falls apart during the closing leaving you to "charge" the moving truck and pizza to feed your movers!

I was ready to make new drapes and with my mother coming to visit, it could not have been a better time. I had most of the fabric and the rest was on order. The fabric store called me to tell me that the fabric had arrived after 4 long weeks. My parents had arrived as well, so we headed on down to pick it up. Much to my dismay, the fabric was not the same shade of chocolate brown and had a big flaw in it.

We were leaving with my returned monies and my mother said, "we could try dyeing the drapes that you have." I have never dyed anything other than t-shirts and I had no idea what it would do or look like. I also thought about the problem of different shades sitting on the same window panel. But, I thought, I hate those drapes so, why not? It is not like I care too much if they are destroyed from our experiment plus, we had extras from the dining room that we already removed.

So, we bought all of the Rit "dark brown" dye liquid that we could find in the city of Richmond and lots of salt and got to work boiling water and stirring drapes around in a large rubbermaid tub with a broom stick. It was a work-out. After washing, setting them out to dry, ironing and re-hemming (the hem came out), we hung them up and I could not have asked for a better color. My vision of this room is finally happening! The dark brown chocolate drapes are shiny and look oddly like leather in the right light. The drapes were dyed 2 at a time in case they came out different shades, but they didn't or at least I can't tell. I love them so much now and I am so happy that my mother suggested this! I couldn't have made prettier ones!