Dye Workshop 2012, part I

Fun, Fun, Fun!! We had ten people for our workshop at Vera's, we worked in her dye studio and pottery workshop, planning to start with ice dyeing. We hauled in several coolers, and must have had a dozen bags of ice. Meredith had the most experience with it, so she guided us along. We each had several silk Charmuese scarves from Dharma to work on, and Vera had silk jacquard yardage, that we divided up. Several of us got 2 yards of each silk, and ripped it length wise for 6 more scarves. Vera and Nancy decided to dye 2 1/2 yard pieces. Meredith had us poke the ends of the scarves into plastic strawberry baskets, wire baskets and plastic gridding, to help with design placement, others got folded or scrunched and put in the baskets to help hold the ice. Everyone had fun choosing different color dyes, to sprinkle over the ice, and we were quiet conservative with our choices, all though several of us did try a multi-color approach.

We worked most of the morning, on setting up the individual piles and baskets of ice and dye. Nancy covered her silk Jacquard yardage with two colors of black, Jet Black and Better Black, each has a different "halo" and bleeds out and separates into it's base colors. Gracie and Peggy also did some cotton fat quarters and t-shirts, and worked in a bucket to "parfait" ice dye. Amy dyed a rayon sundress given to her by Meredith in shades of green/teal/blue for her niece.

As everyone finished up, we loafed in lawn chairs under a 150 year old hickory tree, from the original homesteaders, and caught the cooling breeze. After a trip up the hill, to the main house we had a potluck lunch, of wonderful goodies. We had many salads, quiche, prawns and cocktail sauce, broccoli salad, fruit, and topped it off with apple crisp, chocolate zucchini bread, and sticky buns. After visiting for a while we cut up prepared for dyeing fabric to treat with alum for the marbling the next day. During Friday afternoon, we all wanted to peak at our fabrics, poke them, guess how they are working out, but Meredith was adamant, "NO touching, until 24 hours!" We figured 21 1/2 hours, when we showed up the next morning would be good enough ;) We spent the afternoon treating the fabric with alum and hanging it on the line to dry, making carrageen goop for the marbling the next morning. We stirred and stirred two trays of goop, trying to dissolve the lumps, it got thicker and we worried about stirring in too many bubbles. I used the recipe that came on the package from Dharma, each book had it's own recipe for methel cellulose or carageen. We visited, talked dyes, and Peggy mixed up a few concentrates for "parfait dyeing." The day was getting pretty hot, so we called it an early day and headed home. Photos: 1. Gracie Dyeing 2. Mom & Daughter 3. Peggy's Dye Bucket 4. Peggy Dyeing 5. Peggy & Gracie 6. Kay & Jana at rest 7. Tricolor fat quarters 8. Vera at rest