Monday, February 15, 2010

Snow Dyeing

To those of my readers who are not on the Quiltart list or a reader of Quilting Arts magazine, you may be saying, "What on earth is snow dyeing?" Someone (not me) came up with the idea of using snow as a resist when fabric dyeing. Some people had fabulous results, so I just had to give it a try.
This is what I did. First I soaked my white PFD (prepared for dyeing) fabric in a solution of 9 T soda ash to 1 gallon warm water.



Then I wrung out five pieces, each 1/2 yard, scrunched across the short end of a Rubber Maid wash basin and let them cool. I did two wash basins for a total of 5 yards of fabric. Not pictured here, but then I packed each basin almost to the top with snow.

On this one I drizzled Procion MX dyes (about 2T to 3/4 c water) over the snow. Top to bottom: Turquoise, Strong Orange, Chocolate Brown. I did this at about 10 AM and when I went to bed at 11 PM, I still had a coating of snow that had not melted. Maybe I used too much snow.

This is what it looked like in the morning. Click to see a bigger picture and all the turquoise bits on top. I don't know why this happened.


In the other basin I used some mixed dyes that had been in the refrigerator since April. I used them full strength since I didn't know how much oomph they would have left. Top to bottom: Bright Blue, Mixing Red, Sun Yellow.
Here they are melted in the morning. Please come back tomorrow to see the results.

2 comments:

my croft said...

so, essentially, it's layers -- scrunched fabric, snow, dye -- and the dye seeps down through the fabric as the snow melts and drips. have I got that right?

wv; tracl
I do enjoy when these random wordlike piles of letters are almost a word that makes sense in the context (track, trickle, tracl: a highly irregular verb)

Norma Schlager said...

Yes, that's how it's done, layers. Come back to see the results.