Snow Dyeing - 2010

Just getting my feet wet so to speak in this year's first snow dyeing. I have one heck of a lot of pfd fabric to dye up during the next year!! I will not buy any more pfd fabric, I will not buy anymore pfd fabric.......


Here is the snow piled about 4 inches high on top of 4 yards of fabric squeezed into an area of about 14 x 18 inches.



This time, I decided to mix up 10% solutions of dyes -- intense blue, navy, turquoise, strong orange, sun yellow and the blue-violet -- all these are from Pro Chem so I used their names. I have tried a slightly different arrangement this year so we shall see how it works. I used needlepoint canvas to cover some large flat boxes. As I had no way to attach the canvas to the sides, I placed a smaller box in the middle to hold it up given the weight of the wet fabric, dyes and all that snow. I have two setups downstairs, each which will hopefully work well with four yards of scrunched up flattened fabric so I can do 8 yards at a time (we shall see).

The first of the two boxes I used the straight 10% dyes on top of the snow (which was a very wet packing snow and pretty heavy). I used enough so that it should have colored 4 yards to about a 5% WOG (weight of goods). However, as it was so strong that it didn't cover all the snow (did I say that I hate white on dyed fabrics - well the same applies to snow obviously). I used a mixture of strong orange and navy mixed equally which should give a brown and 10% of intense blue kind of in a striping pattern. As it still wasn't covered, I added 5% sun yellow and more of the intense blue at 5%.

The second box with 4 yards, I started with the 5% concentrations of turquoise and then sun yellow. Then I added in some of the blue/violet mixture. Hopefully, something nice will come out of these and hopefully the watered down dyes will drip to the bottom of the boxes and not onto my basement floor (which is pretty colored already!). Now we just have to be patient...... After the snow loses all its color, I will take each two yard piece keeping the folds in place to the best of my ability and nuke it for about 8 minutes totally (4 min/yard) checking about every minute. Then off to be washed and photographed!

Well, the ones that I started with the 5% solutions are much too light and icky for my tastes so overdye shall happen!! I think I will just overdye with a blue and see what happens. I have found that if you used mixed colors for the first dyeing that a pure color on top always works better and less real mud results. The reverse is also true to give more interesting mixed colors.

Here is the "dark" (10%) solution on top of the snow. It is intense blue and then a mix of strong orange and navy and then threw in some yellow in the areas where there was no coverage.

This is what the darks looked like before they were nuked and then washed out.

Here are some examples of how the darks turned out. Each photo shows a piece about 36 inches by 22 inches (fat half).

This is the "lights" which used 5% solutions of the violet/blue, turquoise and then some yellow on top. I may have thrown in a little of the 10% yellow and violet blue after covering.

This is the lights before nuking and washing.

Here are some of the better areas of the lights. Again, each piece is about 36 inches x 22 inches.

The ones that were done with the 10% solutions looked better to me. There was quite a mess in my basement as well as some obviously chose to drip on the floor rather than in the box so I will be back to doing 4 yards at a time instead of 8!