Oh no...getting rid of the red!

Recently I showed “Posing Posies” a quilt I made with red side setting triangles, and some red and yellow flowers in the middle.

I had a problem.

I had washed the red fabric on the sides either 2 or 3 times - I can’t remember. Maybe 3. I didn’t think about the red on the flowers in the middle at all.

However, in spite of my prewashing, I still had some issues with bleeding all over my creamy quilt top.

I wasn’t really pleased with how “pinky” it looked in spite of my efforts to pre-wash. I debated not doing anything about it. I knew that some of my pink look was because the back had a lot of red on it and when I took pictures, you could see the shadow through it and it make it appear sort of pink.

So, I almost left it. I did. I put it in my room where the finished 2” strips quilts are and left it - for a day or two.

Then I decided to go ahead and try to soak it in a tub. My front loader washing machine, while wonderful (and new!) still doesn’t use all that much water.

So I soaked my quilt. I threw in some blue Lidl hand dishwashing liquid soap - most recommended is Dawn - but we don’t have Dawn over here, so I thought I’d try what we have -

I think it easiest to show you with pictures.

This is the first soaking.

This is the water after I lifted the quilt out of it! There is actually quite a bit of red in it!

I wasn’t really pleased seeing that much red in the water, so I decided to try it again. I had read where you should keep doing it until no more red comes out.

So I did. I let it soak overnight (min. 12 hours) each time.

This is the second soaking:

This was much better!

And this is after the third soaking. I was struggling with shadows.

After three soakings, I looked at it and decided to go for one more.

BTW, our water has a lot of iron in it, so it will never be that beautifully clear color you are envisioning without a filter. We use one on our drinking water in the kitchen.

At this point, I decided that the remaining water was not pink enough to worry about.

And the last one - the fourth soaking:

This is the last soaking and about now I’m pleased with the color of the water.

Each time I pulled the quilt out of the tub and threw it into this laundry tub so that I could get a picture of the water. This is the color of the water that was left in the tub after let all the water go down the tub after the fourth soaking. I considered that this was “just fine” and decided to stop at 4 soakings.

In the end, the quilt seemed a lot less pink - ish.

I then put the whole thing back in the washing machine and washed it ONE more time.

Then I let it dry and took pictures as seen on this post.

Did I get out all of the dye? well, honestly I hadn’t noticed that some of the flowers had run a bit - I had been so focused on the red on the side setting triangles that I didn’t even think about the flowers in the middle. Plus, some of the darker tannish fabrics seemed to absorb the dye really well. While I didn’t like the fact that some of the tan fabrics seemed to be more red than they were supposed to be, because it was a scrappy quilt where I used various shades of tans, I decided to “let it go” and not worry about it anymore! I wasn’t willing to spend anymore time on it!

I am not sure that you will be able to see the difference, but I believe that some of the tan fabrics which absorbed the red

Before:

This is after I did all that soaking. I am not sure that you can see a lot of difference in the pictures.

And now you know! I struggled a bit with this quilt and I DID prewash the red solid fabrics!

In the end, I’m okay with it

Have a great day - wherever you are reading this!

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Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store!

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