you're the cheese to my macaroni: When in doubt.. dye it.

I've been on the hunt for a rehearsal dinner dress for quite some time now. I've spent endless hours scouring sites like ModCloth, ASOS, Victoria's Secret, Express, and the like in search of the perfect dress. Seeing as I wore white for my shower and bachelorette party, I originally wanted to keep the tradition going and find a cute LWD for the occasion. Then Foxy reminded me that we will be picking crabs for dinner, and how it didn't go so well for me the last time I decided to wear white when doing so.

Right he is. White has been nixed.

My search then just turned into one for a cute dress. That's all. Basic, cute, colorful. So when I saw this little tee dress from Victoria's Secret, I fell in love.

Victoria's Secret The Little Tee Dress

What really sold me was the color - it looks like the perfect shade of coral in the picture. And we all know that coral is the new black. At least in my world it is.

Anyhoot, I ordered the dress and got it in the mail a few days later. This is what I saw.

You might notice that it is not necessarily the color it appears to be in the picture from Victoria's Secret. It's.. neon. Which may be the reason why they called it "Caliente Coral". Go figure. It is caliente, indeed.

No matter which way you spin it, this would not do. It looks electric in the pictures I took, and it looks even brighter in real life. If I had aspirations of being a traffic cop, this would be a wonderful little dress to have. Alas, I do not. And alas, again, because I was dead set on wearing a coral dress to the rehearsal at this point. This coral dress, actually.

My solution? Try and fade the color a bit. Don't go lookin' at me all crazy eyed just yet. Because all of my friends already have.

See, the dress itself actually has two layers: the top is a sheer pattern that you can wear as a sexy little beach coverup, or you can add a tank liner and wear it as a dress. The liner happened to be that perfect coral shade I was aiming for, but it was useless under the neon tee.

Liner on the left.. do you see the difference between that and the top layer?! My eyeballs burn.

I figured that if the liner could be that color, why not the dress itself? The worst case scenario would be that the top layer would get effed up and I could either bleach it white and figure it out from there, or just wear it as a beach cover up in Mexico. Either way, I'd get a blog post out of it. ;)

So I headed to Michael's and got some Rit Dye Color Remover.

Image via Rit Dye

Following the directions, I put some hot water in a pot, turned on the burner, and added the solution.

I also made sure to wash the top layer of the dress before soaking it in the color remover solution. Then I threw it in and stirred, stirred, stirred!

Warning: this stuff is smelly.

Soon enough, the fabric started to lighten in color.

I'll admit that I started to get a bit nervous after about 15 minutes of stirring. The dress is made up of a few different fabrics and patterns, and it seemed like some areas were getting faded more than others. I made a judgement call and took it out at that point, washing it two more times before drying and seeing the final results.

And.. you guys? It totally worked.

Boom. Awesome. Rehearsal dress: done.

In my dying frenzy, I also decided to dye a white dress (also from Victoria's Secret) that I deemed a bit too sheer to wear anywhere but the beach. A little blue dye later, and I had a new, wearable dress!