You Win Some, You Lose Some . . .

Hubby was invited to a friend's house to play poker tonight, so while he was gone, I changed all the locks. No, I didn't--that's just one of those little wifely fantasies I sometimes have.

What I REALLY did was meet up with Gran and Pam and our other friend, Darlene, for a girls' night out. We gathered at Bearpaws & Hollyhocks quilt shop, and from there, the four of us went to California Pizza Kitchen for dinner and then to a movie--The Ugly Truth. What a fun time!

The Ugly Truth stars Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler, and while it's not exactly Academy Award material, it had us dying laughing throughout the movie--a good movie to see with a bunch of gal pals! And--something none of us knew beforehand--it's set right here in Sacramento! Where was I when Gerard Butler was here?!

I smuggled two big boxes of Whoppers into the theater, but we were all too full of salad and focaccia bread from CPK to want to eat anything else, so I decided on the drive home that I'd empty one of the boxes into a bowl and count out how many were in the box--and the number of Whoppers would determine the winner of the little Halloween giveaway. Kind of a good idea, huh? Candy/Halloween? Yeah, I thought so!

Sixty-two Whoppers! And the 62nd comment was from . . . [drum roll please!] . . .

MICHELLE! Michelle of MichelleSews! Woo-hoo! Gosh, it seems like Michelle has been a Blogland friend of mine since I started blogging but I don't remember her ever winning one of my giveaways. Michelle, send me your mailing address and I'll get it in the mail on Monday or Tuesday. Congrats!

Now to tell you about the Big Quilt Catastrophy of 2009. Yes, Hubby washed one of my quilts--that red, white, and blue quilt pictured above--with a wine-colored blanket and a wine-colored bed skirt that had likely never been washed before. I seriously don't know what he was thinking--especially since the quilt didn't even need washing. Except that our new mattress was being delivered, and I guess he thought everything that went back on the bed should be washed first.

So yesterday afternoon, he called me at my office to tell me how very, very sorry he was--and, I suspect, to break the news to me when I wasn't close enough to kill him then and there. I told him to keep washing the quilt until I got home.

I've often heard Lindy at the quilt shop tell about a quilter whose red and white quilt bled and how she washed it and washed it and eventually the red came out of the white in time for her to deliver her quilt to a local quilt show. So I thought that was the easiest thing for Hubby to start with. By the time I got home, it had been washed three times and was still red, pink, and blue. I washed it several more times. We used laundry detergent and OxyClean. We used dye magnet cloths. And each time we washed it, it was just as pink as it has been the time before. Before bed, I washed it some more. Then I posted to my blog and asked your advice.

Several of you gave me some good suggestions to try. This morning, I went out to the garage where we keep our laundry stuff and rummaged through all of the cleaning supplies. Yep, I had a box of a cleaner somewhat similar to the Rit Red Out product--this was designed to remove dye that bled in a mixed wash load. So I decided to go ahead and use it. If anything happened, whatever it was had to be better than red, pink, and blue. Seriously. (Edited for inquiring minds: I used Carbona Color Run Remover.)

So, yeah, now I have a yellow, cheddar, and white quilt. Kind of different shades of yellow.

Yes, I did like the red, white, and blue quilt better, but I kind of like the yellow and white quilt too. I have a lot of yellow in my house, and the shades in this quilt now look kind of like an antique quilt. No, I wouldn't have set out to make a quilt in these particular colors, but it IS what it IS, and it's better than red, pink, and blue!

Now, I need to ask your advice again. Can anyone recommend a good "how to" book on laundry? Hubby's been doing ours for about 25 years now, but I think there are a few things he hasn't quite gotten the hang of yet.