More Ice Dyeing and New Thermofax Screens

While Elizabeth was busy with her ice dye experiment, Sue did some ice dyeing of her own.  She brought along some previously dyed pieces for over-dyeing, so decided to see if she could improve them with ice dyeing.  One piece was an uninspiring light green, and the other was a pretty ugly brown with some patches of dark blue.  Of course, she forgot to take "before" pictures.

 Here's the set up of the two trays, with the soda ashed fabric under the ice.

 The pale green fabric got azure blue and kingfisher blue dye.

 The ugly brown got 3 colors - black cherry, deep purple and elephant grey.

The "ugly brown" above is greatly improved.  Most of the brown is transformed, and the odd blue streaks even add a bit of interest.

Likewise, the formerly green piece, now blue-green, has a really lovely texture from the ice.  She is much happier with these two transformed pieces.

In addition, we have made 3 new thermofax screens which will be added to the shop soon - a 5-leaf stem, an ancient pine,  and a berry branch.

Come back every day for more quilt camp adventures in surface design!

Indigo Unwrapped

Remember the wrapped and tied pieces we showed in yesterday's post?  Here's what they look like after rinsing and washing.

This is Elizabeth's clothesline.  The 2 on the left were accordion pleated and banded - one horizontally and one vertically.  The next was pole wrapped on a very small diameter pole, so the dye didn't penetrate very far.  Fourth from the left had various sizes of round wooden discs and glass marbles.  The pieces with circles was folded and clamped between wooden circles.  Second from the right was simply folded and clamped. The piece on the far right was done with whiffle balls rubber banded into the fabric.  Below are some close-ups of the whiffle ball piece.

 Isn't it cool how the holes in the ball create the darker dots at the center of the circles?

This is Sue's clothesline.  On the left is a sleeveless t-shirt.  Next is the green piece that was banded with marbles, then the purple piece that was pole wrapped.  Last is a piece that was folded and clamped with 2 wooden rectangles as the resist.  Below are some close-ups.

If you look closely at this shirt, you can see a pattern of small rectangles.  What Sue did first on this shirt was screen print it with a product called Color Magnet, which is a dye attractant. The rectangles are a slightly darker blue than the rest for some additional subtle patterning.  Adding the bands for the white striping was a last minute decision that turned out well, since the whole thing was just an experiment.  The screen she used is called Rectangle Rows and is available in our Etsy shop.

While indigo is typically done with white fabric, producing the distinctive blue & white patterning, Sue wanted to see what would happen if she over-dyed some colored pieces from previous dyeing sessions.  Above is the green piece where Sue used buttons in the banded areas. Some of the green is still visible around the circles and you can also see where the button holes were on the buttons.

This purple piece was pole wrapped, and while the indigo did not penetrate all the way to the center, there is some very cool patterning along the left and bottom edge of the fabric.

Stay tuned for more adventures with indigo dyeing!

Indigo

On Monday we mixed up an indigo pot.  Originally obtained from plants, indigo is one of the oldest known dyes and is a vat dye.  It is mixed up in a large container and can last quite a while with proper tending.  We purchase"pre-reduced" indigo from PRO Chemical and Dye, meaning it is a synthetic product that simply requires mixing the indigo, some thiox and soda ash in water, then allowing it to sit a few hours for the "bloom" to develop.  The bloom is skimmed off before using the vat, and replaced when finished and tightly covered for use another day.  (ProChem has great instructions for the process on their website.)

 Here Elizabeth skims off the bloom.

Pieces being dyed are submerged in the vat for 2-3 minutes.  The fun thing about indigo is that the pieces are actually green when removed from the dye.

Upon exposure to the air, they begin to oxidize producing the distinctive blue color.

Above you can see the green as it is removed from the vat and the oxidation change to blue as it is exposed to air.  Below are some of the pieces that went into the vat. Results will be revealed tomorrow!

Shibori

One of the things we like to do at quilt camp is dye fabric, scarves, and other items using the Japanese method of resist dyeing called Shibori - which actually encompasses numerous ways to shape and  compress fabric before dyeing it, resulting in surprising and delightful patterns.  You can never completely control the process, so each piece is unique.

Last week, one of the things Sue started off with was preparing fabric with several methods of Shibori to be dyed by immersion dyeing, using up the last of her cobalt blue dye with a bit of Kingfisher blue mixed in.  One of the projects she needs to get started on is for a group exhibit project called "Fly Me to the Moon"; Sue's quilt is to be based on the song "Moon River", so she is attempting to create some fabrics that might be used in this piece.

One piece was pole wrapped, another had marbles banded into the fabric, a third was folded and clamped between wooden circles, and the fourth was accordion folded and banded with rubber bands. Below the fabric is folded and wrapped around a pole (PVC pipe) and wound with string, not too tight so it can be scrunched together as in the second photo.

Compressing the fabric acts as a resist and prevents the dye from penetrating into all the areas of the fabric.  Small glass marbles are inserted in the fabric in the other piece and secured with small rubber bands.  Again, the bands act as a resist and the bound areas absorb less of the dye.  I don't have before photos of the other two pieces, but you can get an idea from the results.

Here the pieces are all "batching" in the bucket of dye - it required a container large enough to cover the fabric wrapped around the pole.  They were allowed to sit about 24 hours.  Here are the results.

This is the pole wrapped piece.  More dye is absorbed on the outer surfaces.  The inner layers are lighter.

The marble piece is folded so you can see both sides.  Notice how on one side, the circle centers are greyer than the other; the greyer circles are the inside that was against the marble.  The bluer color is what was on the outside.

This piece was folded in half lengthwise, then in thirds.  The wooden circles were placed above and below and clamped together.  You can easily see how the  clamped area resisted the dye.  One of these might make the right sized moon, maybe with some more texture added.

This last piece was done to use up some more of the dye, and added after the others were taken out, so the dye was 24 hours old.  Usually the color is not as strong as the dye gets older.  This one was accordion folded and banded at intervals - the vertical white lines are where the rubber bands were placed and the darker horizontal lines were the folds in the fabric.

Today we made an indigo pot and dyed more Shibori pieces in it.  Those results will be shared in another post.

Ice Dyeing Experiment

For the past two years, Elizabeth has been following a Facebook group called "Addicted to Tie Dying" - note the misspelling of dyeing in case you want to try it out.  The members there do some snow and ice dyeing and have been discussing the merits of tying their project dry after having soaked it in soda ash versus wet and wrung, right out of the soda ash soak.  As well, they have been discussing placing the dye on top of the ice or under the ice.

Elizabeth thought it would be interesting to do her own experiment with both options.  However, being excited to begin, on the dry piece she totally forgot about the soda ash soak and dry part!

The wet experiment was done correctly having been soda ask soaked.  She used a hemostat to twirl her fabric into rosettes and bound them loosely with a rubber band.

Let’s call them 3 and 4 across the top row from the left to the right and 1 and 2 on the bottom row. 

3 and 4 were wound dry and 1 and 2 were wound into rosettes when damp from the soda ash soak.  She wanted to see if dyeing dry or wet gave better results.  Rosettes 2 and 4 had the dye powder sprinkled directly on the fabric and the ice over the powder where 1 and 3 had the ice on top of the fabric and the dye powder on top of the ice. 

Unfortunately, she used some bad experiment practices and will need to try again.  She messed up by not soaking her dry samples in soda ash so it would be difficult to say if tying while wet or dry and then dyeing made any differences.  She would need to repeat this to get true results and have all four pieces treated with the soda ash.

She used the very traditional design of splitting a swirl into thirds and using the three primaries, yellow, blue and red in each pie shaped wedge of the circle.  It was difficult to really know where the circle was once covered with ice so she did a lot of guessing (something else that isn’t good practice in an experiment).  She also decided to allow the pieces to sit in the dye liquid (called muck) while they did their 24 hour ”batch” time.   

Mixing the primaries pretty much makes brown and so some of the pieces ended up with some nice brown striping radiating from the middle.  It is always amazing that a rolled piece of fabric with pie shaped dyed wedges makes such a pretty spiral and that sitting in muck (or adding black dye to the top of the circle gives radiating lines.  As far as dye under or over the ice, here are pictures of the results so that you can judge for yourself. 

They hang 1,3 and 2,4 on the clothesline.   It seems that dye under the ice gives a more crisp and clean look to the finished product where dye over the ice gives a more muted and crystal like effect.  Yellow dye is notorious for not “striking” - the term used to mean that it bonds to the fabric and you see the color.  You can see that in number 4 there is no yellow showing even though it was applied.

More experimentation is required, perhaps limiting the number of variables to start.  Stay tuned for more quilt camp experimentation.