Project Disaster! Bleach-rot!

[labricoleuse]

Bleach manufacturers don't like to acknowledge the fact that bleach can damage the integrity of some natural fibers, but it's true. Whenever you apply bleach to a garment, either to bleach it out white or to remove dye or stains, or to create discharge shibori or other effects, you need to use a stop-action chemical after your process. (Some brand names are Bleach-Stop and Anti-Chlor.)



For our last mainstage show, our designer sent some beautiful lightweight discharge-printed Italian cotton fabric that she purchased in the garment district in NYC, from which we made a fin de siecle shirtwaist for a supporting actress. The manufacturers clearly did not employ any stop-action process on their yardage after the discharge effects were created because...



...after 3 launderings during tech, our fabric flat-out disintegrated!

Here's a closer look:



What did we do? (After consoling the draper with a pile of tissues and chocolate, of course.) Make a new blouse in a day from the extant pattern and the closest approximation to the fabric we could find locally. This wound up being a quilting cotton printed with a white floral design on a rust-colored ground, which i then put through a gold dyebath so the whites would turn gold. You can see below, it's nothing much like the original at all, but we had to make the best of what we could get immediately.

Comments

[labricoleuse.livejournal.com]

Yes, it arrived like that. Yardage printed with discharge process has a distinct appearance to it, and i think that pre-washing suspect yardage is the only thing you can do. In this case, we couldn't even contact the manufacturer about it, because it came from some miniscule Italian mill. (Well, i guess we could have, but language barrier/cost makes that of questionable usefulness.) I did try laundering the remaining yardage in Bleach-Stop, but it was too late. The fibers had been already rotted beyond repair and it disintegrated anyway. :(