Back to the Dye Pots!!

Well, after several weeks away and catching up on all my travel blogs, I finally got into the basement, picked up a bit and set myself up to dye some tshirts and more mandalas using ice of course.  I like the look you get with the ice so much better than just squirting dye onto the shirts like the old days. You get much crisper lines with ice dyeing and greater variation in value.    I did three t-shirts and of course the underlying "drop" cloths that I use.

I have done this fanfold technique before on tshirts and really like the effect of doing the fold on the diagonal rather than straight up and down.

For these tshirts, I placed some fabric underneath each one (don't want those stripes occurring from the cookie racks) and then took the soda ashed soaked, fan folded tshirts and made a spiral with each one.  They didn't even take up much room on the racks.  I covered them with ice (just enough so no fabric is peaking through) and then sprinkled generously all my different greens and then a little navy blue and mixing blue just for the heck of it.  I think I threw a little sun yellow in at the very end.  I should note that a couple of the greens are very light greens and obviously have a lot of yellow in them but I also used a very dark green as well.  I like a lot of value contrast!  I let them sit until the ice was all melted and then nuked them each about 4 minutes -- just enough to get them nice and warm.  They looked navy blue at this point.  I rinsed in cold and then warm water and threw them into the washing machine and ran them through twice.  I ran out of Synthrapol so used Dawn and it didn't suds too much and obviously got a lot of the color out!!  

I also did the fan fold on this one although did it right to left this time.  The biggest difference between this bunch and all the others is the size of the fan fold.  Before I folded them about every three inches either across or diagonally and really like that look as well.  Yesterday I decided to only do about an inch deep fold which makes for a lot more color in the shirts and little white space (none as a matter of a fact) while my others have a lot of white in them -- a look I also like.  Now if I could just figure a way to get those fan folds to be more even with a soggy large t-shirt!

 You can see how much color my "drop" cloths got as well!!  This fabric was a drapery weight pfd sateen that I got many years ago.  Before this, I had used it primarily for monoprinting as it has such a nice firm hand.  It is about 54 inches wide and each of these pieces is about 3/4 yard.  I think they will make some great looking tote bags!