Snow Days - Dye Days
I am not a fan of snow. I grew up in Winnipeg AKA Winter-peg. When the snow came, the cold came. But, recently, I have started to looking forward to snow falls. I get to play in the snow in the comfort of my home!!! I love to dye fabrics and using snow or ice to create some beautiful and unplanned colours is something to look forward to.
We had a wonderful snow fall last week and I just couldn't resist. I prepared 1 meter cuts of plain white cotton fabric by soaking for a while in a soda ash solution.
I arranged 1 length of fabric in each of 4 plastic containers. These containers have holes in the bottom, so snow melt drips easily down.
I stacked 2 containers on top of each other. Covered them with a bucket full of snow and sprinkled dye powder over top.
I have been doing some Pinterest searches and saw a post about colour separation. So I thought I'd try to see how different colours mixed and dyed at different speeds. In the top set below, I combined equal amounts of fuchsia, turquoise and bright yellow dye powders in a container and mixed the powders well. I then sprinkled the mixed dye power over the snow. The snow melted and the dyes did their thing! Note how there is no Turquoise. The Turquoise and the yellow combined to create green!
In the bottom set shown above, I used Red, Slate Blue and Golden Yellow. The colours are much muted. The red and blue took over the yellow....no green at all this time.
I liked what I saw and decided to do some more a couple of days later.
I mixed bright yellow, golden yellow, turquoise and sky blue together in the top set above and 2 different blacks in the bottom set. Great results!!!!
Things I learned
I'm quite generous with the dye powder. Need to use a bit less next time to create some softer colours.
I'm not sure I like the 2nd container of fabric underneath the first. I'll probably scrunch both meters of fabric in one container next time.
I'm not patient. I like to see the immediate results of mixing the dyes into the fabrics in the low water immersion method, but snow dyeing can be a lot of fun with unexpected results if you are brave.
I'm getting a new fridge and it will have an ice maker.....so snow/ice dyeing may become a year round activity!!!!
Now, to figure out what to do with these lovely 8 meters of fabric!!!!!
AND A BIG THANK YOU TO MY GRAND DAUGHTER WHO HELD THE FABRICS OUT FOR ME TO PHOTOGRAPH!!!
