Ice-Dyeing: The Prelude....

It looks good enough to eat, right? Sort of like clunky Shave Ice. But no, it's my latest round of ice-dyeing. After dyeing with my friend on my recent visit to Pennsylvania, I decided there were some odds and ends of fabrics in the sewing room that also needed to meet up with more color.

After soaking the fabrics in soda ash solution to make them receptive to the dyes, I squeezed out the excess solution, and scrunched and folded the fabrics. Some had resists like rubber bands and clothes pins added. Then I placed them on plastic mesh stretched and clamped over top of a storage tote. A plastic garbage bag is poised to slide up and over the ice and fabric.

The dyes were mixed (safety note: I was wearing a mask and gloves while handling them) and poured into squeeze bottles ready to apply over the ice. The fun thing about ice-dyeing is how unpredictable it can be. I've got three colors- Mermaid Dream, Palomino Gold, and Kingfisher Blue. The dye powder is concentrated and looks very dark, so it's impossible to tell what they will look like on the fabric, or how they'll blend together. Some dyes even fragment into their component colors, so there can be traces of colors you'd never expect to see.

I bought a 10-pound bag of ice, and used almost all of it to cover the fabric pieces. Now that fabric pieces are under the ice, it's even more of a surprise as to where the dye colors will wind up. As you can see in the first photo, I applied the liquid dye solution in bands across the ice. Now the whole shebang is covered with the plastic bag to "batch" for 24 hours- no peeking. I will say that when rinsing out the dye bottles, the Palomino Gold looked way more rusty-orange than I anticipated. So I'm a little concerned that using it with blue may be a regrettable choice. I was expecting it to be more yellow. I'll show you the results anyway. If they're not good, we'll all learn something! So we wait. 

Meantime, I can share some of the results from our Pennsylvania dyeing day. It amazes me how differently the pieces turn out based on how they are folded, where they were positioned when the dye was applied, and how much of a resist was used. All of these examples are PFD (prepared for dyeing) cotton done with the same three colors. In this case, the colors are Forest Green, Celadon, and Kingfisher Blue (all from Dharma Trading). 

Same dye colors, but look at the difference in intensity.

And this one- did I mention gray? No. That's because we didn't use any. And yet one of the dyes must have had gray as a component because here it is.

And this- Forest Green apparently has some yellow as a component. Some dyes are sold as pure colors and will not fragment into other colors. We didn't use any of them. The oohing and ahhing as each piece is revealed is part of the fun of ice-dyeing. I hope we'll be oohing and ahhing over my current batch. That Palomino Gold has me worried. Stay tuned!