Ice painting

This whole month I talked about snow and ice in combination with Procion MX dyes, but you can also use ice cubes in combination with paint. This time I painted a piece of fabric (approximately 0,5 yard) with a blue and pearl Lumiere paint. Placed this in a container and added some ice cubes.

By using ice cubes it is easy to place them at random as for this technique it is essential that not everywhere melting occurs. After the ice was melted and the fabric was ironed (from the back) it looked like this:

The light areas are the areas where ice melted. The paint there got mixed with the melting water.
Here is another example. You can see that with this fabric more ice cubes were used, resulting in a very pale fabric.

The fabric is very light, but in this detail photo you can see that it is very pretty:

This is my last blogpost about snow and ice dyeing. I hope you enjoyed them and that it gave you inspiration for the coming winter.

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.. 

Another example of using soy wax

For today I am going to show you another example of using soy wax resist. Using this computer part, officially called a metal wire finger guard grill for a computer case fan as a stamp. I bought mine at Amazon.

It is metal, so it get hot when you put it into the soy wax. Be careful and use pliers to hold it. With this grill I stamped the whole fabric.

Placed it flat on a raised platform in a container, added snow to it and sprinkled the soda ash powder together with the Procion dye powder. I used Better Blue Green, Parakeet and Kingfisher Blue (all Dharma). Left it like that till the next day. After rinsing, washing and lots of ironing it turned out like this:

In both today's as well as the previous blogpost I used snow, but this could also have been done using ice dubes. As you have seen, soy wax works great in combination with snow and ice dyeing, but keep in mind that not all resist will work that well. Resists which dissolve in water like potato dextrin, sugar, baby food do not work. While the snow or ice melts, it dissolves the resist. You will get some pattern on your fabric, but not as clear defined as you might have wanted.

Soy wax

A lot of techniques which you use with regular dyeing, can also be used with snow and ice dyeing. In today's blogpost I will show you an example of using soy wax resist. Using an old brush I applied soy wax to the fabric.

I placed the fabric flat on a raised platform in a container. Put snow on top of it and sprinkled soda ash powder together with different dye powders on it. For this one I used Cardinal Red, Gunmetal Gray and Caribbean Blue. Left it like that till the next day. This is how the fabric looked after the snow had melted:

After rinsing, washing and ironing the fabric looks like this:

Keep in mind that for ironing soy wax out of fabric you need lots and lots of old newspapers.

Silk

In all my blogpost of this month I talk about procion dye powder. This is because I have experience with it. On other blogs I have read that there are other fiber reactive dyepowders, but I have never used them. In the first post of this month I mentioned a couple of suppliers. I had no intention of posting a complete list, but mentioned only the ones I had experience with.

Most of the time I work with cotton, but today I am showing you a raw silk piece of fabric which I snow dyed. As it is silk I could not use soda ash, but I presoaked it in vinegar. It was 3,5 yard of silk, so I needed a number of bottles of vinegar. Can you imagine how the studio smelled?

After the soaking the fabric was crunched, placed in a container on a raised platform and covered with a layer of snow. Dye powder was sprinkled over it, approximately 0,5 cup each of Teal Blue, Brushed Steel and Better Blue Green (all Dharma). A thin layer of snow was added to cover the dye powder. Left like this till the next morning. After rinsing, washing and ironing this is how the fabric turned out:

I did not take any process pictures, You know the drill by now :-).

And two detail shots:

Don't know yet what I will do with this fabric, but 3,5 yard should be enough to make some kind of garment.

Parfait

Today I am showing you how to create a parfait or layered dyeing. For this I use a glass vase - easier for the pictures, but of course you can use a container or a bucket as well and 4 fq's of cotton fabric. The fabric was presoaked and labelled with small pieces of Tyvek marked 1 up to 4. First a small container was placed into the vase to create a raised platform.

The first piece of fabric was crunched and place on top of the raised platform.

This was covered with some snow.

Dye powder was sprinkled on it

And this was covered with a bit of snow.

This process was repeated till the vase was full.

The colors I used were:

1- Brazilnut (Dharma)

2- Marigold (Dharma)

3- Watermelon (ProChem)

4- Razzledazzle (Dharma)

The vase was left like this till the next morning. After rinsing, washing and ironing this is how the fabric turned out:

 fabric 1:

fabric 2: 

fabric 3:

fabric 4:

The above fabrics are created with snow. I repeated the whole process with ice cubes using the following dye powders:
1-Robin's Egg Blue (Dharma)
2- Better Blue Green (Dharma)
3- Tangerine (a pure color)
4- Dragon Fruit (Dharma).
And here are the fabrics:

fabric 1:

fabric 2:

fabric 3:

fabric 4:

As you see this technique can be done both with snow or with ice. If I had not marked them, I would not have been able to say which medium I used.

Rubber bands

Rubber bands can be used in different ways. In earlier blogposts I showed them to you in combination with yoghurt cups or with pinches of fabric. Here is another way of using them:

 The fabric was soaked in soda ash before I wrapped the rubber bands around it.

Each rubber band will leave a mark on the dyed fabric. This 'snake' was placed in a container on a raised platform and covered with snow.

I did not measure how much dye powder I used for this one, but the colors I used were Aquamarine, Dark Green and Black (all Dharma). When I work with dyepowder, I prefer to cover the powder with a thin layer of snow. This was left to batch till the next morning.

The fabric was rinsed, washed and ironed and now looks like this:

Instead of using the rubber bands to create a 'snake', you can also use them this way:

The soda soaked fabric was crunched into a ball and rubber bands were wrapped around it. This ball was placed in a container on a raised platform and ice cubes were placed on top. Dye powder was added and some more ice cubes. Sorry, but I forgot to write down which dye powders I used.

After rinsing, washing and ironing the fabric looks like this:

This is a 0,5 yard piece of cotton. Depending on how you crunch this, certain areas will be closer to the outside of the ball than others. This will effect the way the colors show. Areas which are crunched tight, will be lighter than areas where the fabric is more loose.

Is there a difference in result depending on using snow or ice?

Is there a difference in result depending whether you use snow or ice? To answer this question I dyed two 0,5 yard pieces of cotton fabric, one with snow and one with ice. The fabric was soda soaked and rubber bands were tied around pinches of fabric. Each fabric was put into a separate container. On one fabric snow was packed, on the other ice cubes. Approximately 0,25 cup of Chocolate Brown (Dharma) dye powder was sprinkled on each pile. The containers were left in the studio till the next day. This is how they looked after the snow/ice had melted.

I forgot to take pictures before, sorry. The fabric was marked with a black Sharpie in a corner of each fabric. Unfortunately the dye covered the marks completely. Lesson learned. If you want to be able to read your marks after dyeing, use a small piece of Tyvek instead of writing directly onto the fabric.
The next step was to remove the rubber bands and to rinse, wash and iron the fabric.

The top one is my favorite, but is it dyed with snow or with ice? The lighter areas in the second piece are probably caused because the rubber bands were wrapped more tightly there. In both fabrics, the brown dye powder separated nicely in the component colors.

Intro to snow and ice dyeing

Hi, I am Wil Opio Oguta and this month I am going to talk about snow and ice dyeing. Here in the Northern hemisphere winter is approaching and depending where you live, this might give you (a lot of) snow. Or if you live in the Netherlands like me, you hope for snow. We do not get snow every winter so I decided to plan my annual trip to the US in February of this year. Minnesota guarantees snow in that month :-). Don't worry if you live in an area where you do not have snow as you can have lots of fun with dye and ice cubes. Or you can buy an ice cone machine.

The first time I heard of snow dyeing was during the winter of 2007/2008. At that time there was not much information available on the net or in books, so it was a lot of try and error. Not always leading to the result I hoped for, but during the years I came up with a number of techniques which give good results. I want to thank the artists who shared their methods on their blogs. Here are some links:
http://www.carolreatondesigns.blogspot.com/
http://www.bloombakecreate.com/
http://verfvirus.blogspot.com/

For this type of dyeing you need:
- fabric: All cellulose fabric can be dyed this way. Most of the time I work with cotton. I buy pfd (prepared for dyeing) by the bolt.
- soda ash (or vinegar if you dye silk)
- Procion MX dye powder
- dust mask
- utensils like: plastic spoons, colander, containers, things which can be used as a raised platform. Keep in mind that these items cannot be used for food anymore. Mark them and store them separately.
- gloves and apron to protect your hands and clothes.

Let's talk a bit more about the dye powder. As you know you can buy either the pure colors - which have the MX code mentioned, see list here: http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/FAQ/pureMXcolors.shtml - or you can buy mixed colors. Here are a few links where you can buy Procion MX dyes:
http://www.dharmatrading.com/
http://www.prochemicalanddye.com/
http://www.maiwa.com/
http://www.patchworkshop.de/
And of course you can mix your own colors. Here are some links to give you ideas how to do this:
http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/FAQ/maiwa_mxing_guide.shtml
http://tinyurl.com/q3qhoer

Normally when you dye with a pure or mixed color, you get this color on your fabric. Chilling the dye powder by mixing them with snow or ice causes the dye to separate into their component colors. The dyes strike the fabric at different rates creating different colors on your fabric.

There are different ways to mix the snow with the dyes. You can mix the concentrate into snow in a large mixing bowl to get more controlled results. A quarter of a cup of dye mixed with 20 cups of snow will give a strong color to a yard of fabric. If the snow you are using is fluffly, you will need more snow. For pastels you need less dye concentrate. Keep in mind that the snow will dilute the dye, so creating very dark colors is difficult.
An alternative method is to apply the dye directly to the snow. Put snow on top of your fabric - roughly 3 inch or more and pour - or use a squeeze bottle - dye concentrate directly on the snow. Instead of using dye concentrate you can also sprinkle the dye powder directly onto the snow or ice. Don't forget to wear a mask when you are working with dye powder!

Why the raised platform or the colander? If your fabric is submerged in the melting snow/ice, the pattern which is created is duller than when the snow/ice drains away from your fabric. Here are pictures to show you the difference. The first picture shows you a denim coat which was left submerged in melting ice. I used 4 different blues and as you see, they blended a lot.

The next picture shows a cotton fabric which was dyed on a raised platform. You see that the color definition is much stronger here.

When you are finished with your snow/ice and dye, put your container away till the next day. You can cover it with plastic so that the fabric does not dry out.

This was a long post with lots of theory. Next blogpost we start dyeing. See you then.