a hobby of mine recently has been finding used clothing on the local thrift store’s “dollar day” & altering it to conceal or work with its existing stains, tears, or general misshapenness. I’ve tie dyed designer tee shirts, bleach splattered men’s work jeans, & cut up blouses & button downs. there’s something I find fun in remaking a garment which would have otherwise reached the end of its life.
of course, this doesn’t always work. recently I found a discounted pack of plain black socks at a department store & thought they might be interesting if I were to bleach tie dye them. I brought them home, rolled & twisted & knotted them up with tiny rubber bands from the dollar store & dropped them in a bucket of bleach.
nothing happened.
I left them submerged for well over half an hour & yet the socks remained steadfastly black. not even a hint of variation in shade. I checked the materials—natural fibers, not colourfast—& double checked the expiration date on my bleach. no explanation to be found for why my boring black socks were still their original hue.
I think this is probably a lesson. a metaphor perhaps? sometimes even if all the conditions are right, the colour just won’t lift & there’s nothing much at all you can do about it. sometimes you can’t move the mountain.
note: this is the first in a new series I’ve decided to work on called “failure blog”. if you know me, you know I love & appreciate failure more than lots of people & also have some probably silly philosophical ideas about the act of failing. maybe that’s me just trying to make value from the fact that I’ve failed a hell of a lot over the course of my life (& will likely continue to do so), but I think there’s something to the act of failure. especially as a creative. so failure blog will exist for my ruminations on this stuff. for better or worse.