Lipstick on a Pig

I bought two three-quarter sleeve knit shirts, one in green and one in brown, five winters ago when I started losing weight. Two weeks ago, while merrily baking my  Christmas cookies, I managed to drip butter all down the front of my green shirt.

Okay, after five years, I had gotten the use of the shirt and it did have enough spots on it that I could not wear it in public as a "good" shirt. But, it is comfortable, I like it and I was not ready to throw it in the rag pile.

I ran to the laundry room and dribbled a stream of Dawn dishwashing liquid up and down over the butter spots. I needed water to thin the detergent and spread it so I could brush it in to break up the grease. I reached behind me and grabbed my spray bottle of cleaning liquid and gave the vertical stain a couple of shots.

Lo, and behold, I had NOT grabbed the liquid detergent cleaner. It was the spray bottle of diluted bleach that Buck likes to use on the bathroom grout.

I do not always think or react quickly in a crisis, but in the milliseconds that it took for the green to fade to yellow before my eyes, I realized that there was no rinsing the bleach out quickly to return the shirt to its original solid green color. I could toss the shirt, or try to salvage it.

Hey, other people can be artsy and create masterpieces out of trash. Why couldn't I give it a try? I had nothing to lose, did I?

I sprayed more bleach down the center and then two streaks on either side, plus three on back and one down the top of each arm. THEN I rinsed the shirt out and dried it. What I ended up was a bright baby-poop yellow on green kind of tie-dyed look. The chemical composition of the Dawn canceled out the effects of the bleach, so that squiggle in green still remained.

I hated the final result. Ugly, ugly, but maybe I could get away with wearing it in the house?

I pondered--how to get rid of that awful bright yellow. Ahah! I don't drink black tea, but doesn't every self-respecting quilter keep a small supply of tea bags on hand? A nice tea rinse is excellent for giving a too-much-white old-fashioned quilt an antique look. Maybe a tea rinse would help.

I boiled up a bunch of tea in my big pot, removed the bags and let the shirt soak in the hot tea. Once the shirt was rinsed out and dried, I wasn't sure if the tea toned down the yellow all that much, but it did leave faint tan speckles on the shirt. Okay, maybe an improvement. Maybe.

I then thought that I could be ultra-artsy and add some of those iron-on jewels to the neckline. In the end, I decided that would be as beautifying as putting lipstick on a pig.

I may wear the shirt--around the house--but I will never make it in the Artsy Upcycle Hall of Fame.