Color catcher

Brace yourselves, I am about to go commercial.  OKay, not really because no one over at that family company even knows I am typing this & since I am not getting any cash, I don't think I could be described as commercial. 

Anyway.

I am a dedicated pre-washer.  Let me back up.  As a quilter, I pre-wash everything but the thread; the fabric, the batting, everything.  Well, that is everything but you get my drift.  I do this because I used to get headaches in my sewing room.  Can you imagine the conflict I want to sew but my head hurts?  I thought maybe just maybe it was the formaldehyde in the fabric (a good thing or it would rot in transit to your local quilt store).  So I took everything down off the shelves & washed it. Also I had a new washing machine & I wanted to play with it.  & it worked!

Since then, of course, I have been made happy because of all the colors that never ran & ruined my quilts.  Or clothes, clothes are important, too. 

But this means you can trust me when I say everything in the quilt in the picture had been washed before.  Except the thread.  In fact, some of it had been washed more than once because it is made of little squares of many novelties & I often get these in swaps & trades & as gifts & not knowing their history, I wash them. 

Also, you cannot really see it, but the outer border is a very saturated red, & the background & back & binding is a kind of orangey maroon, & there are four panels of la virgin de Guadalupe with a lot of color & a lot of black so I took no chances & washed all of that at least twice before I even began to work with it.  Then when everything was all done, I tossed it in the machine with a color catcher sheet thinking "what the hell".

Imagine my surprise when this came out! 

I was expecting something maybe vaguely pinkish but not this.


This is the exact same color as the background, back & binding just a few shades lighter.  & I do mean just a few.   I am a little concerned about what will happen in its new home; I gave it to my brother saying this will be a good thing to hang on the wall near the door because you can always take it down & wash it.  He lives in another part of the country, but the world is, if anything, grittier & sandier & dirtier than it is here & we live on a dirt road just a few houses down from speed hungry red necks.  Seriously, it is like they think they're mud bogging out there.  A few years ago I could not get out of my driveway because one of them was stuck.  He had over rotated when he started to hydroplane.  On mud.  & he got caught, nose down, in a depression too narrow & too shallow to really be called a ditch.  In mud.  He had to walk home & get towed out, which is no easy fete on a road barely wide enough for two cars to pass.  Do you know how fast you need to be driving to hydroplane on mud?  Too fast!

Enough about my idiot neighbors, back to the color catcher.  I think I am going to include a new sheet, this sheet & the box top when I send this off.  He's a physicist, (no really), I think he can do the math.