Ice Dying- Snow days - the results

So, I have finished washing and drying my ice dyed, then snow dyed garments!

 First the snow and powdered dyed....

 Then it melted... yes there are some leaf bits and stray pine straw. It's snow in the south, we do not have blankets of the stuff to work with!

Tank top one, lots of turquoise! And, the yellow over dyed well.

Tank top 2- the red held it's own with the barrage of turquoise, navy and celadon.

Tank top 3- this one had the most of the green that went yellow, as well as some palomino gold, which interestingly did not turn green.

LESSONS LEARNED-

I wash a load right after these and they seems to have turned a bit blue. So it is either that my HE washer  did not drain all of the water thus depositing, or I remember that I did not re-mix the soda ash mix, which is in it's third use, so it is possible that the chemical reaction was not as strong and more dye released than expected.
~ So, mix the soda ash well
~ Perhaps only use it two times, or replenish
~ Only wash darks after a dye load
~ Try those "color catchers" from Shout


Let me know what you think!

Ice Dying - take three - snow dying

It is a rare thing to see snow in Alabama. I took advantage of this rare occurrence to work on my ice dying project. Since ice dying originated with snow dying and my second experiment left a bit too much white on the garments, I decided to redye with the left over snow.  Leftover snow is even rare-er! But at least in the Deep South, snow one day, warm temps the next!

I can see a distinct advantage to using snow, or shaved ice. ( I realized that I could use shaved ice in the summer, or anytime without snow, to replicate this process, if I like it better than it ice cubes from the fridge.) You have precision in the placement of the dyes. As well as, you can get a more even distribution of the dye once the snow melts. OK, this last statement was an assumption, we will see one the garments come out of the dye bath. The garments were mostly green from the first time with a few bits of other colors.

I also had another realization, that I think was proved in second dye process, where the color was most intense, which means where it had the most powdered dye, dyed to the color base, not necessarily to the actual dye color. For example, the greens had a base of yellow, so the center of the green went yellow and the edges were green. The navy went purple in the center and the edges were purple. This could be a reaction with my water, so dying with the snow will eliminate most of the reaction if it is my local water.

Here's my process pics-

I used celadon,  turquoise and navy. This is my color map.

process pic without the arrows and words.