Why not dye?

While we were at my Mother's for Christmas, she offered me the two sets of bedlinen that used to be mine when I still lived at home. Seeing as they're still in relatively good condition and we enjoy free things, we said yes and brought them both back to Oxford. The only thing we disliked about the two sets was that they're the same. 

Therefore, when my wife suggested that we dye one set, I got all excited and we popped to Hobbycraft at the weekend. We had already looked at the different colours we could buy and decided we wanted the Tulip Red Dylon machine dye. Thankfully they had that specific colour and we snapped up a pack for £6.49. We then also bought the 500g pack of salt for £1.

Upon getting home, we brought out the duvet cover and four pillowcases:

Following the instructions on the packet, we put the linen in for a quick wash so it was damp,

poured the dye mix into the drum, covered it with the salt and added the linen back into the machine. We then did a 40° cycle, added a liquitab when it was finished and reran the 40° cycle until the dyeing stage was finally finished!

We still had to run another 40° cycle with another liquitab to try to clean out the machine. We don't want all our clothes being dyed, and hung out the bedlinen to dry.

Because we didn't use any pre-dye, the colour wasn't as red as it would probably otherwise have been, but we'd decided we wanted to try to make a deeper red and hence left the linen as it was to begin with.

Anyways, here's the finished result (please excuse the terrible lighting, but it was dark)

And for comparisons sake, here's the other set to show the colour difference:

Although the colour didn't come out quite as we expected, we're still happy with it and glad we decided to dye the set.