Sunday, February 8, 2009

It's Getting Warmer, I am Getting Colder - More Snow Dyeing!

The second batch as you can see turned out just great! I was a little worried as I had left it overnight and all the snow melted and there were some disgusting piles of dirty blue in places but it seemed to wash all out. I was definitely working with lower concentrations for this piece but still LOVE it for its wonderful watercolor quality. I can easily see how I can use this multi-color stuff in my piecing!!

We had 50+ temps yesterday and I see that by the end of the week, we will be in the consistent 40's so the snow will melt -- most of it at least. You know you have the dyeing bug bad (got to add this to my 50+ list) when you longingly gaze at the 8 foot piles of snow in front of the local Walmart....and me thinking I want to spend winter at the beach in the south...hmmm.


This is a closeup of the piece as it is 2+ yards of fabric altogether.

This is a second closeup in a particularly interesting area (I thought).


With all that in mind, I scoured another 17 yards of fabric and am at it again!! This time I made up respectable amounts of the dye and will see with this next bunch what happens with higher concentrations of dyes and a lot more of the blue!!


So I made up Pro Chem's Golden Yellow, Sun Yellow, Intense Blue, Turquoise, Deep Navy and their Blue/Violet so that I would have a little red in the mix. I am guessing that I will get a lot of green but it would be cool if there were some plain blue and yellow areas. I pretty much covered the pile of snow which was very, very wet almost solid ice snow today (very heavy). I knew I would know the 29 varieties of snow before this is all over.......


This is about an hour into the third piece and you can see that already the dye is moving downward through the very heavy thick icy snow. I have the dye liquids sitting on the side where they will stay cool from the melting snow. I waited until what snow was left was all white, took that off and then did the usual nuking and washing.



This is the piece from the above mix. I really liked it. It is amazing how much separated out of the purple/blue mix from ProChem. I love using this particular mix because that happens (it is made up of mixing red and mixing blue which I determined from discharging it and seeing the colors it became). If you mix this color with yellow, you come up with every color in the rainbow when doing overdyeing. This was the top half of a piece that was ab out 3 yards long.

This is the bottom half of the above piece. It is very Monet looking which I love!
This is a closeup of one section of the piece above showing all the colors I got using the purple/blue mix, the two yellows, turquoise and intense blue.
I am awaiting my next iteration now. I had to go to a different part of my yard to collect snow as it was nothing but ice in my old retrieval place. I did find a shadier area where the snow still separated instead of being a solid chunk. Maybe I can get one more in before I have to head to Walmart for their snow.......

This is very sad. I used to hate the heat and humidity but dyeing made me look forward to those days (the dyes love it) and now I look forward to intense cold and snow? Very, very sad -- I must be insane -- but let's just say creative for now...

3 comments:

  1. These have turned out great. For the moment, I am bemoaning the fact that we don't get snow.

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  2. Love that last one in particular but ... I cannot believe my eyes ... You did not layer fabric at the bottom of the tray??? A missed opportunity for a new mop-up cloth?!?! That's just wrong!

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  3. Thanks for documenting this...to bad I live in S CA!

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