Backyard Textile Work

I like to think the do-it-yourself attitude I enjoy is rubbing off on my wife. She desired her bathrobe, a light pink be a different color and rather than paying $80 to send it off and have it dyed, she decided to do it on her own.

She purchased a bottle of dye from the craft store and the instructions made it very clear we were going to have to boil the robe in dye for half an hour. A bathrobe is not a small item of clothing and not having a pot large enough she decided we would need to do this outside over a fire in some kind of kettle. 

So she hunted down a kettle. Which is to say a metal garbage can.

We were all out of firewood for the season so she found somebody with some downed limbs that needed cleaning up and picked those up.

She had me build a fire-pit/kettle-stand out of some red bricks we've had laying around and grabbed the grill off our BBQ to help hold the trash can up over the flames. The BBQ lid became the lid for the trash can.

We partially filled the trash can with water to confirm no major leaks, set it up on the grill, and lit the fire.

Once the water was boiling (about half and hour later), we added the dye.

This caused come concern in our son.

After boiling the robe for half an hour, the work of the dye was done and we took the trash can off the fire to cool. Not wanting those hot coals to go to waste, we decided to have smores. This improved our son's outlook on the whole project.