Snow, Glorious Snow Dye!

The "Blizzard of the Century", which was messy but highly over rated here hit today. Schools were closed, and I got to stay home from work and play! What do fiber artists do on snowy days? Snow dye of course! (even though I know I should be finishing up some unfinished projects and painting a snow angel...)

To be fair, I started this process several days ago in anticipation of having fresh fluffy snow today. On Sunday, I cut up my fabric into the sizes I wanted and soaked them in soda ash for several hours. I also mixed my dye pots. I'm using Procion MX dye from Pro Chemical . Since there is NO soda ash in my dye pots, they will last a while after being prepared.

The first batch I dyed right after I took the fabric out of the soda ash. I wrung the excess water out, scrunched up the fabric, placed it on my dye tray and took it outdoors. I piled about 3 or 4 inches of snow on top, patted it down lightly and poured my dye over top in a random pattern, using mixing blue, turquoise, ultraviolet and mulberry. It was so cold out, my fingers were burning by the time I was able to bring it all back inside, and all I could think was, "this better be worth it".

I'm pleased with these pieces, so I guess risking frostbitten fingers was worth it!

Monday started with frozen solid fabric. I had wrung it out of soda ash, placed the fabrics in a freezer bag and froze them the night before . Really, I mean they were frozen solid. It was like a little iceberg. So, this bunch of fabric had 2 things different than Sunday's fabric. First, it was MUCH colder. Second, it was a frozen solid lump, so I couldn't manipulate the fabric however I wanted before dying. I used the same process though; covered it in snow, this time packing the snow down firmly, and poured the dye on top. This batch used golden yellow, turquoise, and celery.

This batch took all day to melt, about 8 hours inside my house before most of the snow melted away. MX dyes by nature work better when warm, so dying in snow is sort of a weird experiment...and this batch was REALLY cold. Also, some people say that colours with a lot of turquoise don't do well with snow dye techniques. So, 2 strikes against this batch, but this is what I ended up with. My golden yellow (which really started out much more orange) is now very yellow, yes, the turquoise is very faint and I don't really see much green (I suspect because my green separated into blue and more yellow). These pieces also have much more white in them than Sunday's batch. While I don't love these pieces as much as the first ones, they are still very "Springy" and will have their place in my planned Spring Thaw quilt.

Batch 3 was done in today's snowstorm. This time I started with partially thawed fabric. Mostly it was thawed enough to manipulate, but there were still some frozen areas. Today I also changed up how I put the dye on the fabric. This time I filled a container with snow, mixed in a bit of dye and then put the coloured snow on the fabrics. I didn't put nearly as much snow on top as in the previous batches-just enough to thoroughly cover the fabric. Black, mixing red, turquoise and celery were today's colour selection, though you can see my dye was covered with fresh snow as it fell from the sky faster than I could get into the house. I'm thrilled with the results of this batch, I just love them! The dye colours separated a lot and there's colours on my fabric I never put on it; lots of blue, some brown and most surprisingly yellow! (makes sense I guess, blue and yellow from the green, probably blues and browns and whatever else from the black).

Okay, so I was only going to do 3 batches, but I still have more dye to use up, and more white fabric too, so I think I'm going to keep at this for a while! I'll give it a try on some silk and see how that differs from the cotton. I'm also wondering what would happen if I froze dye in ice cube trays, crushed the ice cubes and then sprinkled it over the fabric like salt? Oh the possibilities!