I've been meaning to try snow dying for a long time...but usually I think about it during the summer. LOL We'll, last week someone in one of the Facebook groups I belong to mentioned it, reminding me that it was on my list of things to try, and as luck would have it we're up to our eyeballs in snow this winter.
I started by Googling 'snow dying', watched a couple of videos to find out what I needed to do, and then I got started. While my muslin was soaking in the soda ash solution, I prepared a few skeins of crochet cotton and then added them to the soda ash solution too.
While that was soaking, I went outside with a big basin and filled in up with snow.
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| Bin 1 |
I set up three basins for the dying:
Bin 1. yellow, fushia, scarlet
Bin 2. yellow, turquoise, blue, green
Bin 3. yellow, blue, green, purple
These first images show the snow covered with the procion MX dye powder, most of which has quickly dissolved into the snow.
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| Bin 2 |
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| Bin 3 |
You're supposed to cover it and leave it for 24 hours, but you know I couldn't do that.
;o)
...So here's what bin 1 and 2 looked like about 30 minutes later (don't know why I forgot bin 3):
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| Bin 1 |
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| Bin 2 |
And then a while later...you can see the little blue baskets I put in upside down, to raise the fabric and skeins up out to the melting snow/dye.
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| bin 3 |
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| bin 1 |
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| bin 2 |
Okay, this is scheduled to post at midnight and I'm off to bed. I'll show you the reveal in Friday's post. See you then...
This crazy piece was in bin 1, but it didn't take the dye too well. It's a piece that has been used for a wipe up cloth, then had some left over setacolour paint poured over it while it was folded and crumpled, and now it's been snow dyed. It has some interesting potential in small pieces perhaps.
If you guessed 'playing with Procion MX dyes', you'd be right. I'm thrilled with the wonderful range of colours I've now got to work with in my art quilts for the next while! I'm especially excited by how well the cheese cloth takes the dye, resulting in fabulously brilliant colours. I also made a bunch of skeins of cotton threads which I also included in the dyeing process, so I'll have all of these wonderful hand-dyed threads to use to embellish my work with hand stitch.
There are so many ideas running through my imagination for what to do with these and the indigo pieces I dyed earlier in the summer...I'm off to sew!
After auditioning a few fabric choices I settled on some of my purple and blue hand dyed pieces to bring out the colour in the yarn used for the paper making. I used a duel sewing machine needle to quilt some random pathways on the main background piece and then attached the paper using some more machine stitching.
I wanted an asymmetrical piece, so I added a few more pieces of the hand dyed fabric to create the piece that hangs down from the right side of the finished piece. They were embellished with some accent buttons, coordinating threads and beads. Finally, I added some hand stitching, using hand dyed variegated threads, to create some more pathways as well as added texture using the seed stitch and a few cross stitches on the smaller squares and rectangles.
