Ice Dye Playday

Several of us got together for an ice dyeing play day at Amy's. The weather had been close to 100 all week, but it cooled down for us to a perfect 85. We mixed up two buckets of soda ash, so we could pre-soak our fabrics. Amy had the backyard set up with wire shelving for racks and we all brought different plastic baskets, wire baskets, colanders and stuff to place the fabric in and let the ice drip through. Cheryl brought a large plastic tub, and a refrigerator shelf which she placed on bricks to suspend in the tub. She dyed a several yard piece of fabric all at once.

We wore aprons, rubber gloves and tried to remember the masks when working with the dry dye powder. Several of the ladies had silk scarves to dye, t-shirts and cotton napkins also.

We covered the baskets with plastic to let the ice melt and the dye to batch set. We had a wonderful potluck lunch and just visited and talked about what we were doing. After some time passed, all the ice melted pretty quickly, we took the fabric out of the baskets and put each piece into a Ziplock bag to take home and let set overnight.

Clare seams to like purple. The large piece of fabric she pinched the center of each half and twisted it into opposite directions to create the spiral.

Lorraine twisted her fabric from the corner and used the indigo color Procion MX dye to get the shibori like result.

Sara's multi color silk scarf matches her tie dye t-shirt.

Cheryl's large piece of fabric was the one in the tub. The other fabric was a combo of electric blue and indigo. We had many of the individually named colors of dye powder, instead of working with the 3 primaries and mixing our own blends. We feel this gave us much better results, because we kept getting the same purples and greens every time.

This was made with Chinese red and burgundy, the other with dutch chocolate and terracotta. Other favorite colors were lime squeeze, and hot pink, we also tried better black and jet black, they combined great with the bronze. I can't tell which was more "Black" because we did not use a high enough concentration of dye and we were mixing it with other colors. Amy took her last few pieces of soda ashed fabric and hung it on the clothes line, she dripped liquid dyes on it, left over from our last dye workshop. The fabrics were left over night in the plastic bags, then rinsed until the water ran mostly clear, then washed with Synthrapol in the wash machine and dried and ironed. See the June meeting post to see the results.