As mentioned before, my attempts at snow dyeing this winter have been less than successful as I underestimated the strength of my ten year old dyes!! I also didn't have much color choice as my favorite colors have run out and I'm bound and determined to use up what I have! This is a twice dyed turtleneck that I am very pleased with. After I dyed it the first time, there were huge slightly off white areas at the top so I just dumped some blue-violet and boysenberry and left the rest alone. It is deemed wearable now. The turtleneck is from KMart -- their Basic Editions. I have found the tshirts of this brand to dye beautifully and I think the turtlenecks do too!
These next two are twice snow dyed yardage. At the bottom of the post you will see what they looked like before they were overdyed. I like the results a lot. This is basically half of a three yard piece. I used mostly the blue-violet mix, grape, mixing blue and boysenberry. I don't keep "mixed" dyes on hand for the most part with a couple of exceptions (basic brown, blue-violet and black). The little bit of green is some ancient leaf green that I had.
This last piece is just a scrunched regular snow dyed piece. With the technique that used, I really call it snow resist dyeing as I am using snow to block the dye from hitting the fabric except for slowly. Shibori is a mechanical resist which causes resistance to dyes because of folding and the dyes having to travel to dye and thus you get the patterning. With the first two pieces, it is basically a combination of using snow as a resist and using folding as a resist. The fabric used is Joann's Egyptian cotton which is an excellent fabric for dyeing with a beautiful soft hand and more resistant to fierce wrinkling than the Pima or even Testfabrics broadcloth. I can see virtually no difference in the depth of shade between the fabrics. I don't know whether Joanns is still selling this fabric from the same vendor as it seemed rougher last time I looked. Luckily I have hoarded quite a bit of it with my 50% off coupons over the past few years!
The most effective process for getting the fabric prepared is to scour it and then (if I want to fan fold it), iron it. Then do the fanfolding lengthwise (or widthwise depending up the length) and put clips on it to hold it together while you make sure all areas are touched when soaked in the soda ash solution. Then squeeze out the excess liquid and put it on the surface used for the snow dyeing. Lately I have been using inverted boxes sitting in the double sink and a box top stretched across the top (but slanted so the excess water and dye run off into the sink). This has been much easier than the box in a box approach I used earlier.
The snow is pretty much melted now but we are expecting more tonight and tomorrow so I am all ready with scoured and ironed fabric!
This what the above pieces looked like before I applied the second layer of dyeing. As this one had so much color already, I decided that some discharging and other treatments (like marbling) might be more useful eventually.
Beth, These fabrics are simply STUNNING. I'm sitting here drooling over the gorgeous combinations of colors.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful!
ReplyDeleteHi Beth,
ReplyDeleteThese are lovely! :) You seem to know so much about dyes and I was hoping I could ask you a question. I used procion dye (Sunrise Red) on a 100% rayon scarf last night. I followed the instructions to a t, including curing for 24 hours, however the red went yellow in a number of places. NOT what I had hoped for. I wanted very clean red contrasting against the white of the original scarf.
Do you have any idea what I did wrong? Obviously I'm a beginner, so my experience isn't vast, but I am extremely meticulous. The only thing I can think of is that the house wasn't warm enough during the curing period. It has been in the 60s here and the house isn't exactly warm. Would this cause the red to turn yellow?
Thanks for all your help! This is a wonderfully informative blog! :)
Well, the color you used is really a mixture of yellow and probably mixing red (two pure colors). What happened was that the red in the mix quickly bonded with the fabric and the yellow (which bonds more slowly)picked the areas that had not picked up the red dye. It is a big problem with the reds -- they bond very, very quickly while the other colors are much slower. The only way you can hope to avoid this is to swish the fabric around lots and lots and lots for the first 15 minutes of adding the color and then to continue after you add the soda ash (dye fixative). You didn't say whether you had done low water immersion or immersion dyeing.
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