August is ice dye

I have been reading several blogs where people have been experimenting with snow and ice dyeing. We are too close to the coast here for snow (though today it is snowing just 1 hour from here) so for me it was going to have to be ice dyeing.

I filled up two ice cube trays, hoping that would be enough for the technique. There are some great tutorials on You tube which I checked out before beginning.

I set up a kitty litter tray (not used for cats, only dyeing) with an old metal cake cooler. Most tutorials on the internet showed using a plastic drip tray but I didn’t have one, the metal did not affect the process.

Using cotton sheeting I put a sop cloth in the bottom of the tray to catch the excess dye.

The fabric had all been pre-prepared with soda ash solution a few days previously and dried, so I re-dampened the fabric and then scrunched

or concertina folded onto the cake cooler.

The scrunched fabric created some lovely flower like patterning, the pleated fabrics were more landscape like. Even the sop cloth had some interesting patterning.

The fabric was covered with the rather large ice cubes and then (mask in place) procion dye powder was sprinkled over. The whole tray was encased in a large plastic bag and left alone for 48 hours to perform its magic.

This was a quick easy process which I will definitely be trying again with different size ice pieces, different ways of arranging fabrics and different colour combinations. I will also try using the fabric straight out of the soda ash soak to ensure good colour coverage (though it may reduce the patterning if too wet).