Trying Dyeing or Die Trying - Snow Dyeing!

Starting off by saying that "blocking" my Bird of Paradise on my design wall certainly did the trick and it now lies nice and flat with no ripples or bumps. Now to put on the facing and the sleeve and it will be done (without pleats!!). I think it will look perfect over our brown sofa at the beach.

There has been a lot of talk lately on the "Dyegest" lately about snow dyeing so as we have a sufficient supply of snow, thought that this would be a fun little exercise to get me back into dyeing and painting. So I snowboarded through the internet for instructions and found various approaches:

1. Sprinkle dye powder on the snow and then take snow and glop it onto prepared fabric (presoaked in soda ash but don't know whether they let it dry or not). After glopping, let it sit until melted, removing water along the way. Either finish it off in the microwave or wait a few days (the temps would be too low for quick reactions) and then wash out.

2. Squirt dye liquid onto the snow outside and let it sit (I would assume until frozen) and then scoop up the colored snow and glop it onto fabric and do as in #1.

3. Glop bunches of snow onto prepared fabric inside, then squirt the dyes on top of the snow and let melt and then do as #1 above.

Now the approach I decided to take was 3. I wanted some simple way to get the water out without having to deal with lifting up the mass so I inverted one plastic box on top of another and piled two yards of fabric on that inverted box. I figure (we shall see how it works) that the water will melt and will slide off the sides of the box into the bottom box. A screen would be a lot better, but I wasn't up for a trip to Lowe's and construction at this point! The picture above is what it looked like after I threw the liquid dyes on. I used (Pro Chem) Sun yellow, golden yellow, mixing red and intense blue. The yellows were a pretty hefty concentration (around 10%), the blue about 5% and the red around 2 %. I tried to get about 10 grams of dye altogether on the 2 yards of fabric. All that water will dilute things a bit. I scrunched the fabric as evenly as one-layered as I could across the top of the box, put about 5 inches of snow on top (at least in the middle, less on the sides) and then squirted the dyes with squirt bottles. I intend to let it go until all the ice melts, get rid of any puddles of dye and let sit several hours and then nuke it. I like to get it relatively dry before nuking so that there is not a lot of migration of the dyes.

This is the side view of the fabric, snow and inverted clear plastic box on top of the white box. The box was probably 18" x 24" or thereabouts.