DYEING IS A DYING ART

When I bought my Tokyo Teahouse, the living room, hall and bedroom floors were covered with green carpet, a color once popular but long relegated to the dungeon of decoration favor. It was good quality carpet, and I didn’t care to pay for a whole houseful of new flooring. My solution: have the carpet dyed dark brown. 

I called a company which claimed expertise in this area, and their dyers went to work, spraying/rubbing a reddish liquid into my green carpet. (For those of you who want to try this at home - and I heartily recommend that you don’t - to dye green carpet brown requires an infusion of a red-based color.) Perhaps I should have specified, “dyed, not killed”.

Several hours later, I had a houseful of brown carpet. Lovely? No quite. As I looked closely, I noticed that some of the red dye had spattered onto the lower part of my white walls. I tried to remove the spots, only to find that the red spatters became streaks of pink!

Eventually, I had the walls primed and re-painted white. 

As far as the carpet was concerned (and if you buy carpet, you always want to be sure that it is concerned carpet, and not the blasé kind) the dye adhered well, affording me years of brown-carpeted bliss. 

I had avoided wearing shoes in the house, but the carpet dye also adhered to the bottoms of my brown socks, which thereafter reflected a red hue! 

The best of those socks were “Fisherman Weave” socks made by Camp. These were particularly sturdy. I never wore through the toe or heel of a Camp sock. (That sounds like an endorsement opportunity, but the company is no longer in business.) Forty years later, I still have several pairs of those Camp socks: brown, with red-brown bottoms.