Idiot's Guide to Dyeing Fabric

-Get the fabric from your mom.

-Cut it out according to the pattern for a circle skirt.

-Buy blue Rit dye.

-Take fabric and dye to the basement where the washing machine is located.

-Go back upstairs to get reading glasses because the directions on the back of the Rit dye bottle are microscopic and you’re old.

-Once back in the basement, put on glasses to read instructions that say, “If using washing machine method, go to ritdye.com/washingmachine

-Swear like a sailor as you go BACK upstairs to get your phone so you can go to the website indicated on the bottle of Rit dye.

-Take phone down to basement, use phone to go to website. Read first step: Wet fabric…

-Take fabric back upstairs to wet it in the kitchen sink since you don’t have a sink in your basement laundry room and your washer is a front loader so you can’t just start running the water into the tub of the washer while the door is unlocked. Son of a bitch.

-Tromp back down to basement with now-wet fabric.

-Read next step on website: Wearing gloves, mix dye in four cups of VERY hot water.

-Take bottle of dye, phone, AND glasses back upstairs to kitchen where you start 4 cups of water heating on the stove. At this point, after eleventy billion trips up and down those mf-ing stairs, you decide to read ALL the steps of the directions before you take one more step up or down those stairs.

-Once the four cups of water are VERY hot, you take the pan with the water/dye mix, another container of VERY hot water (four cups again), your glasses and your phone BACK down to the washing machine where you start a wash cycle, adding a soak cycle to the process.

-Once the wash cycle has started, you dump the water/dye mixture into the detergent dispenser and then the VERY hot water, which serves as a rinsing agent for the detergent cup and…you hope for the best as the machine does its thing.

-After the fabric has been dyed, you run a load of towels in an effort to clean all the blue dye out of your washer.

And that’s that. Unless you’re way smarter than I am and read your directions first so you can save yourself fifty bazillion trips up and down the stairs.

No wonder my left knee hurt for a week after this incident.