A brown cotton organdy dress from 1950 becomes white once again.

This dress was donated by a follower. It belonged to her mother, Pat. Pat and Bob were married on September 2nd of 1950 in Santa Cruz, California. How cute is that photo? And there's a beautiful photo of Pat wearing the dress. I just want to mention I received so many beautiful cards in these packages where people send donations. Thank you so much. That's very thoughtful. So the dress is made out of cotton organdy and I guess it was imported cotton organdy. It's an embroidered and you can see that it is definitely oxidized from time. I had to open up that side seam to be able to get it on the mannequin because of the short side zipper. But you can see it was the beautiful kind of border embroidery on it. And then what's really unique with this is there's a separate detachable, it's I'm calling it an overskirt train. So it had the effect of a train but you could just totally just take it off and that is also made out of organdy. It was custom made for Pat at the White House department store in San Francisco, California and I found an image. What a beautiful building. Of course it's no longer a department store sadly. But you can see here that yes this organdy has definitely oxidized and become brown from time and there's some pretty significant spots. So I'm a little concerned about because sometimes when these spots sit for so long they can really start to deteriorate the fabric. But I'm going to do what I can to bring this back to it closer to its former glory. And I do have to say though when something has such deep patina like this I actually kind of find it quite beautiful. But that's not what we're going to, we're not going to leave it because that's not good for the dress either. As I mentioned that can really be hard on the fibers for it to kind of wear away at them. So I'm just starting with some plain water to start. I had leftover from last week's project one of the rinse water rounds. So I just started with plain water and you can see already how much is coming out in that water. So now moving on to retro wash a bit of Dawn and washing soda. And I did that for two hours. Let's see what we got here and oh my goodness you guessed it. And this is after a few rounds already. So it had a lot that it wanted to get out. So I did some rinsing and then two hours just sitting in plain water. And I'm doing a little bit warmer. The last few dresses have been silk so I can go a warmer temperature with this because it's cotton. Doing sodium perborate now which I did one cup dissolved in hot water because that's what activates it. Putting it in my tub inside a tub. I'm doing both at the same time now. And I've got the water temperature up to 130 Fahrenheit and then I'm doing these various things to keep it submerged and let it sit for 12 hours. So let's take a look and you can kind of see it's definitely getting lighter. There's more stuff coming out of the water. Yay love to see that. But now we have some odd spots. Quite a few. There's none on the train but just on the there are somewhat I'm guessing because of the color that it might be rust. But we're not quite there with the brightening so I'm going to do another round of the sodium perborate. Fresh round. Fresh solution. Solution. And then cover it up. And I bumped it up a little bit to 140 because that's actually what sodium perborate prefers. And I'll let that go for 24 hours and we have even more coming out. Put it outside on my mesh rack so I could get a better look at what we have here. And yep those are still there. So I am giving it a rinse and then I'm going to proceed as if it is rust. So I'm starting with this Wink product. You just spray it on there and I do this outside if I can. Wear gloves. It seems to be working. Now normally when I've used this it takes like no longer than 15 minutes. Sometimes just even in seconds. But while that's taking longer to work on I'm going to go back inside and go on to finishing that over skirt. So I rinsed it. Washed it. Rinsed it. Another round of rinsing. And then let that dry on the line. Look at how flowy that cotton organy is. I love that fabric. And it's suppressing. And there's a lot of fabric in this over skirt. So it took me quite a while. And it's got a horse hair braid hem. So now back on to the dress. So I did a rinse to get rid of the cold water rinse to get rid of the rust remover. And I'm going to move on to a different solution. And that's with citric acid dissolved in warm water. I put some cotton browns underneath it and sprinkled it with salt. And the directions say to let it sit for 20 minutes. And I did that in the sun. And it did nothing. So now I'm doing another natural kind of remedy with lemon juice. Same thing. And with salt on top. And this one you can let it sit longer. So I did two hours again in the sun. And nothing. So I decided to rinse it. And then I went back to doing the Wink product, the rust remover product again. And it's kind of it's working a little bit. But I'm just so surprised that it's not going away like what I'm used to for this product. I mean, granted, when something's been in there for so long, it's going to be harder to get out. But anyway, I go back inside and I'm going to wash. First, I'll do all the cold water rinsing. And then I rinsed it well, because you don't want to be combining any of these products. So I'm kind of rinsing in between different attempts. And I did my peroxide, Dawn baking soda combination. That is kind of a go to for stains. Did a little bit, not much, but I'm going to do one more round. Let it sit longer. I think I'd let it sit for an hour, rinse it off and it's better. But I I'm calling it. I just decided it's time to move on. I'm hoping that it lightens a bit once it's dry because stains do look darker when they're wet. So we'll see what happens at the end. So I did some washing and rinsing, brought it back outside, did some more rinsing. It just really helps for me to be able to lay it out like this and and do some rinsing. And then I noticed maybe they were there, maybe they weren't, but there were some tears in one area of the skirt. And here's how those spots ended up. So they did improve, but they're not gone. So then I repair that tear in the skirt and then the collar definitely shows some wear. There's some places that needed to be repaired and there's a couple of small tears in the back, upper back of the bodice. So I put a piece of organza as a solution to kind of help shore that up a little bit. And then the bodice in the front. And it was hard to see. I kind of had to get it at a right angle, but there's two splits. So I really thought about it for a while, played around with some ideas and I decided to take some vintage organdy that a friend had given me and I wanted to do a pleated piece. So to help me to get more even pleats, I made this sort of pleat guide out of freezer paper. I found a YouTube video that somebody posted on this process. And so I thought, well, what the heck, I'll give it a try. I've had this freezer paper forever. And so you just make the kind of form. I did half inch spacing on it and then pressed the organdy and look at that. I think that's pretty cool. So then I took those, finished them off, and I inserted them into those areas on the bodice and that covers up those holes. So here we are. What a journey. But look at that before, my goodness, and the after. Wow. I am always so happy and so surprised when something just so brown becomes white again, especially cotton. It is really quite a wonderful thing. And I am so glad that this beauty is out in the world once again, 75 years later.