Sometimes You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs...

The only prince among the frogs. This is about a quarter of a yard of the two yard piece. I retrieved about 1 1/2 yards of this piece altogether.

The snow is melting fast here in upstate NY despite the 2 feet plus we got last week. I have been snowdyeing like crazy for the past couple of weeks and yesterday just had a few dyes leftover and very little real snow with which to work. I have been dyeing 2 yard pieces scrunched. I decided to really see how this process was actually working today so folded two yard pieces first in half, then quarters, then eighths, then sixteenths and didn't scrunch at all. Just placed some snow on top and squirted a lot of dye (week old and who knows what concentration at this point) all over in kind of stripey patterns. I did two of these. On one I used mostly blues and a little yellow and on the other was mostly yellow, brown, orange and a little blue.

The browns were okay and interesting in parts and at least told me how the colors moved.

Now this blue piece isn't in the least bit interesting allover but you can certainly see where the snow pushed out either all the soda ash or the color (for those of you complaining about what blues do). It also doesn't look much different from regular low water immersion (lwi).

Very different results for the two. The only with mostly blues had only about 1/3 of that I consider even a little bit interesting. I can see from the patterning of the net that the part that is interesting is the part that was lowest in the pile! The second with the mostly warm colors had a lot more patterning throughout with only the topmost layer being very faded with poor patterning.

My conclusions are that the blues are really washed through before they get a chance to bond with the fabric while those warmer colors are more apt to work better with a folded application like shibori. The dyes went through the 16 layers and did most of their work on that last layer. It seems obvious now but wasn't obvious to me before. I am also using less and less snow as the snow is getting increasingly like ice pellets and very heavy, leaving a lot of water.

There is a real art to determining how much snow to use and how heavy it is. You want to get a little bit of the washout without a total washout as the snow melts. I haven't gotten there yet obviously!

I did throw in two t-shirts this morning with a little snow and what remained of my blues and yellows. Always nice to have a couple of more

t-shirts.