snow again

Woke up yesterday to yet more snow so I decided to use it to try some snow-dyeing. I was hoping the snow would last long enough for me to prepare the fabrics, and it did. So, having cut roughly A4 size pieces of various white fabrics, I washed them to remove any finishing on the fabric, soaked them in a soda ash solution for 30 minutes and was then ready to start. I think any of my neighbours looking out would have thought I was mad collecting fresh snow in a big bowl! Some of the fabrics I folded into strips, the rest were just loosely scrunched up and they were put into a couple of containers. I decided to try a mix of yellows for one batch (lemon yellow, golden yellow and a rust orange) and for the other I used ice blue, midnight blue and raspberry. I covered the fabrics with the snow and as I was using procion dye powders, wore a mask to just sprinkle the powder randomly over the snow. The containers were then covered and left for the dye and snow to do their work. I did think that being indoors the snow would melt fairly quickly but was really surprised how long it lasted, even after 6 hours there was still a residue left.

These are the two containers with the dyes sprinkled over.

The next part was the hardest, actually leaving them without poking about to see if it was working! They were left for the rest of the day and overnight before being rinsed in cold water first and then warm water to remove any residual dye, and then left to dry.

Here are the blues/raspberry fabrics. As you can see the take up varied depending on the fabrics used. The colours are slightly brighter than the photos show and I was pleased with some of the effects obtained. The thicker linen type fabric didn't take up very much detail at all but I do like the hazy colour variation.

The yellows were a real disappointment! The rust orange didn't take at all and the two yellows didn't have enough definition to look very good. I had used some lace, which being synthetic, I didn't really think would work well. I was right, it just ended up a creamy colour with no detail.

Anyway, it was a different fun dyeing technique to try and I have some fabrics to use in future projects. 

At the time I didn't have the right coloured dye powders to do any fabric in my current project colours but, looking at the effects achieved, I'm not sure this technique would work very well as I'm aiming for a more controlled linear look. More on that later.