I dropped a linen blank into chestnut to make it off white and apparently made a mistake. It turned out too dark. I decided to discharge it, and then thought "Why not use this opportunity to add some pattern? I know! I'll do some shibori (thread resist) and then discharge! What genius!" Well maybe not. I set up a pattern of stripes across the cloth and then folded the cloth and began to run stitches down the fold. When I have all of the folds stitched I will gather them tightly and put the cloth into the discharge bath. In theory, where the gathers are tight, the brown of the chestnut will remain in an interesting dental x-ray pattern with the rest of the cloth going back to off-whitish. (The Japanese call this pattern ora nui.) Then, without removing the stitches, I plan to put the cloth into indigo, resulting, theoretically, in a brown pattern on blue cloth. This seemed like a fun thing to do with a brown cloth, not too hard, not too stressful. Well it isn't hard, but it is very time consuming. There are over twenty rows and each one takes an hour to stitch, so more that twenty hours of work just to get it to the point where I can ruin it in a dyebath. Oh boy. Having fun now. Actually, I like to stitch so I'm okay with this, but it is way more work than my original blithe idea indicated. All of these tablecloths become major projects, even when they seem simple. It's a good thing I like doing this stuff.