Thread experiment

Hello, hello. Sorry I've been away for so long, but I've been extremely busy. I managed to make a couple of baby quilts last week to be auctioned off for a local school fundraiser (wouldn't you know that in my rush to get them finished and delivered, I forgot to take pictures!) and then vend at a local quilt guild show on Saturday. Sunday was spent recovering and rearranging the furniture in our bedroom to make room for a tv cabinet from another part of the house. That meant moving a dresser from our bedroom to a different bedroom and (eek!) purging some of our clothes to adjust to decrease in drawer space. It felt good to purge a little though. I have some jeans that I've "grown out of" that I'm going to give my sister to wear after she has her baby, but before she can fit back into her regular size 2 clothes (I know, it's sickening).

Anyway, I got sidetracked a little there. What I really want to tell you about is my thread experiment. First, our local Wal-mart stopped carrying embroidery floss, so I am now carrying it in the shop. But instead of DMC, I'm carrying a brand called Presencia. I had used some of their 100% cotton sewing thread before and loved it (very smooth and very little lint), but had never tried their embroidery floss. The sales rep told me that the quality of Presencia floss is better than DMC - no bleeding, colorfast, and even bleachfast! So what did I do....I did a little experiment to test their claims! Here's what happened...

I cut a skein of color 1906 (sort of a burgundy-ish red) into 4 sections. The first section was my control, meaning I didn't put it through any test. I put the second section in a bowl of lukewarm water and stirred it around a little. The water didn't change color, so I left it for about 10 minutes or so (keep in mind, my testing wasn't very scientific) and came back. The water was still clear. See?
And here's the third section in a bowl of water with a couple tablespoons of laundry detergent stirred in. Once again, I let it soak for 10 minutes or so (while I caught up on some of my blog reading), and once again, no bleeding.
The fourth section got the bleach test. I added two capfuls of bleach to my bowl of water (which I'm guessing was about 2 cups of water), stirred it around, and added the floss.Again, no bleeding.

Here are all of the sections (in order from top to bottom) after they dried. I kept them on the paper towel that I used to blot them dry so that you could see that they didn't bleed on the paper towel either.

As you can see, the colors stayed pretty much the same. The section that was soaked in bleach water faded a little bit, but not much.

Conclusion: I can wash my redwork quilts (assuming I ever finish one) without worrying about the red thread bleeding or fading too badly. Now, the red fabric may be a different story, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there.