Monday, February 22, 2010

Freeze dyed gets....

... 2 thumbs down. The idea of dyeing frozen soda ashed fabric intrigued me so I decided to give it a try. I placed my frozen fabric on netting over a container so it didn't sit in the liquid. I squirted dye all over it and let in sit in the cold garage for 20 hours then brought in back in the house for about 5 more hours. When I started to rinse out the dye, I noticed that there was a whole area where the dye never penetrated. This is butt ugly. My dye rags come out better looking! I have a bunch of choices here... I can try to discharge the right side and do some deconstructed screening on the left, or I can cut it in half and use the left side for a dye rag and just cut up the other side as needed. I think I am leaning towards that. I really do not need another piece of fabric that needs so much work to be salvaged. ... or I could give it away to someone who thinks they can fix it up.

Things did get better. I rarely use premixed dyes but I fell in love with Grape so I have been using it. It does some really lovely things. I had just a bit left from the crossover dyeing and wanted to use it up so I added it to some yellow hoping for a nice brown. When it was batching I wasn't real happy with it and still wasn't thrilled when I was ironing it, but when I hung it up on my design wall I had all sorts of ideas pop into my head. This reminds me of the cave paintings at Lascaux. I am happy with this piece. I even wrote down the measurements and might be able to duplicate it.

It is yet another rainy, gloomy, chilly day here... it's getting depressing. Maybe I will go back to my hand stitching. Got the sleeve on a piece yesterday and need to make a label for an upcoming show.

10 comments:

JillW said...

why not overdye the "butt ugly" piece? that would be easy...maybe w a lightish blue?

Gerrie said...

Yes - overdye, overdye, overdye. One of my favorite things to do and then you can discharge and get incredible cloth.

Karen S said...

I agree -- overdye -- you could paint thickened dyes over the boring parts.

Sherryl said...

Maybe... I guess I better order a real mask if I am going to discharge.

Norma Schlager said...

I, too, would over dye it. I think the fact that you had no snow to use as a resist made a difference. But I did use snow and I still wasn't thrilled with the result.

Margie Kraft said...

If you should happen to try snow-dyeing again don't use the rack. Let the fabric sit in the snow-melt dye liquid until the snow is all melted. I use a chopstick to poke the fabric down in the dye water to avoid big white areas. I noticed on other blogs that the people that are not happy with the snow-dye method use a rack of some sort to keep the fabric up.

Michele/TextileTraveler said...

Sorry you had a bad experience. I live in central Texas, so I don't get much chance to do snow dyeing :-) But don't don't don't get rid of that ugly fabric! Some of my ugliest pieces have turned out wonderfully when I played them more--overdyeing, stamping, cutting up and reassembling, etc.

Rayna said...

Ditto on the overdye. Just throw it into any old dark color and be done with it. Then, you can deconstruct with Thiox paste through a screen with some resist or other and worst case, if you still hate it, give it to me - LOL.

Carole said...

Sherryl... I am not a 'dyer'... but I wouldn't quit on this.. just overdye and if it still is uggers, I will share it with Rayna!

Wil said...

You just had bad luck with your ice dyed fabric. When I use this technique I do not put the fabric over netting or so. Check out my blog. A couple of days ago I posted a comparison between snow and ice dyeing.
Don't throw this piece of fabric away, but overdye it.