Project Pinterest: Ombre Curtains

This week for my project inspired by Pinterest, I made ombre curtains for my bedroom.
We've all been pinning anything and everything ombre since, well, since pinterest began and this is my first attempt at actually making something ombre.

This started off as a DIY project based off of a tutorial from Rit Dye and this, which made it look so easy!

The moral of the story, it wasn't super easy and involved a lot of trial and error. I've decided that this is much more of an ART project rather than a CRAFT, if you get what I mean, I felt like I was painting or something.

Case in point: I started off mixing two different Rit Dyes as suggested on their color palate. I ended up adding more of one color and then another color entirely to my dye mix as the project progressed.

So while this isn't really a tutorial, keep reading, I do have some tips and tricks I learned along the way.

I started off slightly modifying Rit's instructions to work for curtains. First, I put my curtains on an old rod and rigged myself a little pulley system in order to try and dye them evenly. This worked and I'd recommend it. At the end of the dying process, I took the curtains off of the rod and quickly dunked the lightest part into the dye and immediately rinsed it out.


Please note the cat in the window staring intently at the craziness happening in the yard...

Rit's instructions end with throwing the project in the washing machine. Bad idea. Basically, when I took it out the dye had bleed and the whole thing was a fairly solid salmon pink (which was not at all the color I was aiming for) and you could hardly tell it was ombre. Oops.
So in comes my brilliant idea of using bleach....and it worked! I dunked the light end into a mixture of bleach and water and let the dark end sit in the dye for longer and basically spent the next few hours going back and forth between, "Oops, I bleached out too much color" and "Crap, now it's too dark".

Once I got it how I liked it, I rung it out and hung it on a ladder and sprayed it with a hose for a really long time, in leu of throwing it in the washing machine. I wanted to get out any excess dye and bleach without letting the colors run again.

And voilà...curtain success!

Other tips and tricks...
If you do end up with bleach on one end and dye on the other, throw the whole thing over top of a ladder letting the bleach rinse out and down one side and the dye down the other. 


I'd recommend doing this outside on a warm day, I was pretty soaked by the time I finished hosing everything down. There was a point when I looked down and realized I was standing in what looked to be a pool of blood. Thankfully, it was just a puddle of red dye run off, but none the less, I'm very glad I didn't attempt this inside.

Also, I knew I'd get dye/bleach on my clothes, so I just wore an old swimsuit and got dye all over myself and pretended like I was some sort of hippie artist, which I kind of was for the afternoon.