Snow/Ice Dyeing Parfait Style

Last week I had a wonderful three days with two friends. We have been wanting to try ice dyeing fabric but it takes longer than a day so we planned a retreat.  Here we are setting things up.

Judy is all decked out in her dyeing/painting clothes and getting water for a bucket of soda ash solution to soak our fabrics.

This is our extensive selection of dyes, thanks to Judy. Don't all the possibilities look exciting?

These are more supplies for our projects.

This is the set-up I used for ice dyeing. It is an upside down dish rack in a kitty litter pan.

 Here is the set-up for my friends.

 

First we soaked fat 1/4's of the fabric. Then we placed two of them on the racks, scrunching the fabric to fit.

 

We were trying to decide whether to do snow or ice dyeing. I have an old ice crusher and we started crushing the ice and it took quite a while. It was very hot and we were afraid the crushed ice would melt before we had a chance to get enough crushed, so we decided to lay a thick blanket of the "snow" on our fabric. 

Then we placed a large quantity of ice on top of the "snow".

Next we sprinkled our dyes on the ice.  Some of it fell onto the fabric.  Look what the "Stormy Gray" color did. It separated into the different colors comprising the gray.  Not many of these dots of color were visible in the end product.  Somehow they combined to form the gray after all the ice had melted.

This is a lot of dye, at least 2 teaspoons. 

We wore masks to avoid inhaling the dye. It blew about easily. We sprinkled it on through a sieve to avoid clumps of dye. We used a few different colors of dye.

 

I love to parfait dye fabric.  So we figured why not try that? So another fat 1/4 piece of soda ash soaked fabric was placed on top of the dye and ice.  We then repeated the process with just ice and a few more colors of dye.  I stuck with analagous colors so that we didn't get muddy colors.

 

Then I noticed that there was some nice color falling to the bottom of the pan.  Well, I don't like to waste dye, so I slipped another piece of the fabric in the bottom of the tray.

Mary also added lace to the bottom of the tray.

 

 Then we thought we would try a different way to layer our parfait ice dyeing. This is a large bucket with a wire basket from the $ Store on the bottom and a plastic  paper plate holder on top of it. 

 All 3 of us did this parfait. So the bottom fabric was a wool for Mary with her ice and dye. Then Judy placed her fabric and dye. On top was mine. Then I saw all the dye particles on the table, mopped it up with my soaked "clean-up" cloth. I put it in a plastic cup and placed it on top to batch in the bucket. Then we put the lid on the bucket.

We covered the dye and buckets so the rain woudn't cause trouble.

 

We also covered our trays with plastic to let the ice melt and "batch" overnight.

 

 Can you see the ice in the bucket? We couldn't believe it when we checked 18 hours later!

 This is what the pan looked like.  So, next we rinsed all the fabrics until the water was clear and then hung them to dry.

These are mine. On the left and fourth from left are the first layer in my tray.  The middle one was the top layer. The second one from left was from the bottom of the tray-probably my favorite.  It is a very different texture from the others.  The far right is my clean up cloth.

These are Judy's.  Isn't it rich and wonderful color?  She was very liberal in applying the dye.  I especially like the 2nd from the right as it has a little "Robin Egg Blue" color

 Here is Mary with hers.  The left one is wool.  We all love the 3rd from the left. The color is really beautiful, like a nature scene.  I think it was in the bottom of the tray.

 These are the parfaits from the bucket. They are lined up in order they were in the bucket. The left one is Mary's wool.  It looks lighter, probably because there are some artificial fibers in the wool that did not dye as well.  It was still really lovely.  You can see that the middle layer collected the most color variation, as it got color from below and above as well as what Judy put on it.  It is darker because more dye was applied.

Be sure to visit Mary ("The Inside Stori") and Judy's ("Windy Hill Happenings") blogs to see their photos of our snow/ice dyeing fun. Links are on the right-hand side of my blog posting under blog lists. Mary's is