The Trouble With Red Thread

Don't you hate it when something that is supposed to be a five-minute job turns into a nightmare task? That's exactly what happened to me last week. It was a very, very big lesson.

I've been wearing my embroidered Vans out and about. I didn't want to be precious about them: after all, I spent all the time working on them, I figured I may as well enjoy wearing them. And they have turned out to be a very comfortable pair of shoes. And, as was expected, they got a bit of dirt on them from my travels. 

So, I brought them over to the sink, scrubbed off the dirt, rinsed them, then put them on the deck to dry. I got myself ready to leave for work, but as I was leaving, I gasped as I noticed this:

I promptly put them back in the house before the sun baked in all of the dye. When I got home, I tried cleaning off the dye but quickly realized that there was no point trying to do that when the culprit red thread was still hemorrhaging dye. So, I cut it off and sat back to look at the damage:

And I figured that if I was going to replace the rosette, I may as well test the thread for bleeding before I put it on. I took out these two skeins of variegated red and grey thread and tied them off in the same way I would when dying yarn:

I washed them in soap, rinsed them, let them soak in the water, and then left them to dry on some paper towel, and luckily, they didn't bleed. I think the nature of them being variegated meant that the dye process used for them was designed not to let the different colours bleed into each other:

Meanwhile, the shoe began to develop yellow marks on the undyed sections. These aren't my shoes, but apparently, this problem is common with canvas shoes these days. This set my heart racing, as the problem was getting worse and worse:

This led me down another rabbit hole trying to figure out what to do about the brown stains. I scrubbed, soaked, rinsed and scrubbed again... all to no avail. And then I watched this video that described wrapping them in wet toilet paper and letting them dry. Is that ridiculous or what? Who would be so silly as to try such a thing?

But you know what? IT WORKED. Holy cannoli. And the red stains were also lessened greatly after my week of cleaning:

So today, I replaced the rosettes. There's still a bit of a pink tinge along one of them, but I figured that they're so low to the ground that you probably won't even notice it unless you crawled along next to me to look for them. I'm not sure anyone's willing to do that these days:

So there you go: lesson learned. What was the lesson? Prewash your thread? Don't wash white embroidered shoes? Mummify your accessories?

I don't actually know what the lesson is, to be honest. I'm just grateful it worked out. And there's no point stressing about red thread, because if you look carefully at the photo above, the red flower near the heel didn't bleed at all, and it was as soaked as everything else on that shoe. So que sera, sera... what will be will be.

And what's more, I have a whole other project of red thread on white cotton that I'm working on, so I'll just soldier on and hope for the best:

Have a good week!