Back to Ice Dyeing!!

Well, I can't stay away!!  I found my favorite Basic Edition t-shirts at KMart in my size and decided I needed some new colors of tshirts.  This is one of the tshirts, folded in fours and scrunched up on top of a cookie rack over a plastic bin.  They have been soaked in a soda ash solution for 15 minutes.  I then squeeze out the excess and arrange the tshirts.  The soda ash solution is 1/2 cup soda ash to 1 gallon of water.

 This is a second scrunched tshirt -- scrunched overall.

These are two shirts, accordion folded and then twisted into a spiral.

 This is the all-over scrunched tshirt with the layer of ice cubes and then the dyes are liberally sprinkled on top.  The colors I used for this were ProChem's grape and intense blue as I just wanted to see these colors together.  I added a little turquoise in as well.

These are the two spirals with their dyes (same colors) applied.  The grape stayed kind of clumpy and didn't melt for a long time.  The intense blue literally sprinkled.  I think it is because there is a filler in the intense blue.

This was the spirals after about 2 hours of sitting.  There is still a little color left in the ice.

These are the spirals right before I take the next step -- this was about 3 1/2 hours after I started.  I use very cold ice cubes frozen in my chest freezer which gets things colder than my fridge freezer.  You can see there is no color left in the ice so I call it "done".

My next step is to take each individual tshirt and keep it wound or scrunched as it is and put it in a plastic tray with a styrofoam plate covering it and put it in my studio microwave for 4 min.  I fill up two 4 gallon pails with warmish water while I am waiting for each tshirt.  I rinse in each tshirt in each of the two pails (I change the water in the first pot between each tshirt, ie for the second shirt I use the pot I used second for the first tshirt which doesn't have as much color and then for the second rinse, I use the clean water.)  Especially for turquoise and the other blues, this microwave step assures good strong color -- these Procion MX dyes are "cold water" dyes but heat really speeds up the process and it is my "make sure" step.  There was an article some time ago  in Quilting Arts magazine that showed what happens with turquoise if you don't apply some heat at some point in the process --- very little color.

The last step is to wash in the washing machine for at least 30 minutes using the hottest water you can and Synthrapol and then rinse twice.  Sometimes I do this process twice depending on the colors - reds are particularly hard to get out.  Synthrapol is a strong detergent/surfactant.

This is one of the two spiral tshirts.  I do like the colors and the color seems to go all the way through as this was the first time I had tried this approach.

I am liking the grape a lot but will have to do my accordion folds a little more evenly I think!!

 This is the overall scrunched tshirt above.

This is the scrunched tshirt that was folded in fourths.  I do like the combination of the intense blue and grape.

Dyeing - The After

The experiment from yesterday turned out moderately well. I should add that my black kitty was intrigued by my dyeing and sat on the table the whole time I was working -- I was afraid he would try to drink the dyes, so I did cover up the pieces when they were batching! A little colored dye on him would not have hurt as he only has one little 1 inch round white patch on his belly. He of course insisted on sitting on the fabric while I was trying to take pictures. He definitely claimed all of it as his!


This was a 2 yard piece of cotton sateen (retrieved from my "what is it" pile) that weighed in at almost 400 gms. I used a 3% solution of MX Grape to dye the whole piece (lwi) (12 gms -- about a tbsp-- of dye in 4 cups of water). I then made up a solution of 12 gms (about a tbsp) of Basic Blue dye dissolved in 1 cup of urea water. I pour half of this onto the first 1/8 of the fabric and added 1/2 cup of water to the dye solution and mixed. Took 1/2 cup of this and poured onto the second 1/8 etc. doing this a total of 8 times. It was not too scientific, just eyeballing. I smushed the dye around so that it would cover the general area. I waited about 15 minutes and then carefully poured 4 cups of relatively warm (body temp) soda ash solution and gently smushed all the fabric again, trying not to move things around too much (I didn't do a very good job of arranging the fabric originally though). I then let it sit four about 4 hours before washout. I didn't do any more smushing after the initial soda ash addition (and probably should have as there were some light areas that obviously hadn't gotten hit with the soda ash solution). The whitish areas were not horrible though. The above is how I do gradations using separate baggies as well -- I have described that elsewhere in my blog.
I do love the color that the Basic Blue and Grape together though. Both are not especially intense colors, but together they become fairly intense and give you very nice blue/purples -- better than I have gotten with any other combination!

This was the Sun Yellow to Fuchsia gradation. For this I used 4 yards of the Egyptian cotton that I get from Joanns. It has a wonderful hand and dyes beautifully. For this, I initially dyed the whole piece with a 3% solution of sun yellow (12 gms of dye in 4 cups of water). I then made up a 1.5% solution of the fuchsia (6 gms of dye in 1 cup of water). I used a milder solution as I knew fuchsia would overwhelm the yellow. This one worked rather well I though although I wouldn't do four yards again probably. This may get overdyed -- am not sure yet. I think the effects you get with applying several layers of color are so much more interesting! An Intense Blue bath might be interesting!

Anyway, today it will probably be a gradation from yellow to one of the blues. We shall see!

Dyeing Day - Before

All the miscellaneous stuff that is "fit" to dye is going to be the fodder for yet some new experiments. Some time back, I published directions on how I do "double" dyeing in a "low water immersion (lwi)" gradation. It kind of duplicates the rows and columns in Carol Soderlund's dyeing book but without all the measuring! It basically gives you a gradation from one color to another by holding one color constant and doing a gradation of the second color.

My new experiment will be to try to do this on one piece of cloth instead of the individual pieces of yardage. I am going to start with a four yard piece (about 400 gms) and will put out instructions if it comes out okay. My first attempts will be moving from the yellows to the reds with hopefully some interesting oranges in between. This will all come in handy for my lily piece which requires a lot of shading. We shall see how this all works! My goal is always to simplify measuring and still get okay results. The first one above is the move from sun yellow to fuchsia. I used a constant 3% dye to weight of goods for the sun yellow (ProChem's name) and started with a strongest of 3% of the fuchsia with 8 gradations so it would be 3%, 1.5%, .75%, .40%, .20%, .10%, .05 and .02%. I am going to leave the stuff batching for longer than normal as it is not all sitting covered up in liquid like it normally is -- more like dye painting than lwi. Also the basic blue and grape below do like a little bit longer batching time.

I decided I wanted to try a gradation of grape (a pure purple color of MX dyes) to Basic Blue. Both of these are moderately weak dyes that don't give very intense colors but should result in some nice blue/purples (I hope).

I always liked the calculation part of chemistry but always hated the exactness which rarely got me the conclusions I was supposed to get anyway!! But it did train me to take notes, develop hypotheses etc. The reward of this type of work is that I get a lot of output for relatively little work as compared to the marbling which is very labor and cost intensive!!

Again, I have been sewing as well and two out of the four aprons have been finished. If my sister Gail guarantees that her husband won't see my blog, I will put pictures up! Otherwise, it will have to wait! All these aprons have required something other than just sewing them together!! Two have marbling on them, one is dyed and one has been plasticized by ironing on the Heat N Bond vinyl covering. I bought a whole bolt of this many, many years ago and never have used it. So all sorts of experiments have been going on.

So off to scrub the dyes off my arms before dinner out!