A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Dye cubes

Here is another way of using dye cubes. Left over dye concentrate was poured into ice cube containers and placed in the freezer. Two fq's of fabric were soda soaked.


One piece of fabric was placed flat in a container and dye cubes were placed at random on the fabric. There is a piece of cardboard in the container covered with plastic. This gives enough raise so that the fabric will not be in the melting dye.


 This is not my best picture, but you get the idea :-). The second piece of fabric was placed over it.


This was left batching till the next day. After rinsing, washing and ironing the fabric looks like this:



I had not marked which fabric was at the bottom and which at the top. My guess is that the top picture shows the fabric which was on top and that the bottom one was as the bottom. The colors blend a bit more on that one. 
Having seen these results, I make certain that whenever I have some dye concentrate as a left over, that I freeze it. With frozen dye it is difficult to see which color it is. If you want to keep track of that, I suggest that after freezing, you put the dye cubes in small ziplock baggies on which you can write which color is in it.. 

8 comments:

  1. I really like that idea of freezing dye concentrate. Beats having it exhaust in the refrigerator!!

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  2. They are beautiful. I love the diagonal flow of the pieces. I wonder if the tray was flat or at a slight tilt. I suppose it is just the nature of the melt flow (?). This has been fun learning more about this technique,thank you!

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  3. Wonderful results! I'll have to try it.

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  4. Ann, the tray was slightly tilted.

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  5. How very clever. Someone mentioned to me they froze their dye concentrate when they couldn't use it all right away. I have not tried it for painting with after, but she said it worked.

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  6. This is very clever! My first thought was that there were not enough ice cubes. I would never have thought the dyes would have migrated so far. You final fabrics are beautiful!

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  7. Wonderful tutorials. Thank you for sharing. I like to do snow dyeing in winter but I have never tried ice dyeing and it's is on my TO DO list. You shared some great tips. Thanks again.

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