To Dye For Part 2: Ice Dye

Having learned from the shibori experience (take pictures, document your work), I was better prepared for Jessica Kaufman's "Incredible Ice Dye" class at Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance last weekend. Jess is the owner of Waxon Studio in Asheville, North Carolina. Jess teaches dye techniques, sells materials, and sells finished dyed goods. This time, I took pictures in progress and afterwards.

For our class Jess had five-gallon buckets of "mordant" ready — recipe is one cup of soda ash/washing soda to one gallon water. Jess said this mixture can be used repeatedly. As for any dyeing project, start with clean laundered fabric. We dunked our fabric in the soda ash water for at least 10 minutes. This makes the fabric ready to activate the dye by shifting the pH to alkaline. Jess mentioned soda ash is sometimes used in pool maintenance and comes in 50 pound bags. If you have a friend with a swimming pool, you might be able to "borrow" a cup or two of soda ash.

We used basic shibori techniques to create patterns. For ice dyeing, arrange your fabric first. You might scrunch it or whirl it or fold it. Then put it in a container that is the same size as the item. If the container is bigger, you need to build a wall of something (cardboard? plastic? leftover building supplies?) to hold the ice in place. Cover the item with a layer of ice. Not too much ice — just enough to cover.

Then sprinkle the items with dye! A small sieve was included with the cost of our class. We tap, tap, tapped the dye powder over the ice. This is like sprinkling powdered sugar on a beignet. Some of the most interesting dyes are the dark or dull ones. This is because they have multiple dye stuffs in them to create complex colors. In ice dyeing, the tiny bits of dye migrate as the ice melts. This breaks the dye apart into its components. If the dye powder is all one dye material, you get interesting patterns. But if the dye powder has multiple different dyes, you get different colors. And picking dyes whose colors might interact will give you even more colors!

Then you walk away. Yup. Just leave the ice to melt. Let it sit at least a day. Jess had us let the items sit in the muck. Trust the muck.

The class was on Sunday. SEFAA was a great place to take this class because they have a dye studio with appropriate tools and a concrete floor that cleans up if you spill. On Tuesday I went back over to SEFAA and rinsed my items in cold water until the water ran clear. It was fun to see the beautiful things other people were rinsing out! I took my items home and gave them a hot wash with a squirt of blue Dawn dish washing soap. (What did we do before the invention of blue Dawn?)

Here are the results:

This picture was taken after the dye had been sitting awhile. Already the dusting of dye powder had followed the melting ice down into the container. Colors used were peach, sage, and raspberry. I applied the dye in spots spread across the item.

I purchased this 100% rayon infinity scarf as a dye blank from Jess. Because the scarf was folded before scrunching, the dye pattern is symmetrical when worn with the seam at back neck.

The infinity scarf is long enough to wrap twice. Jess also showed how it can be worn as an attractive but modest head covering. I ended up with a nice random pattern of colors that mimics floral wallpaper. The garment seems appropriate for something created on the first day of spring!

The towel is wrapped up into a swirl. Jess called this a hurricane rather than a tornado, as it needs to be flat. After cross-binding it with rubber bands to keep it together, I flipped it over to the flat side. At this point we were running out of regular-sized pieces of ice. The small pieces of ice are piled up in the center of the circle, but there's very little at the edges. I applied peach dye in the center. Then I applied oxblood red in four places to create an "X." I filled in the remainder with a blue-purple dye named deep space.

Interestingly, the color is much more vibrant in the corners than in the center. There are some interesting greenish and orange-ish lines where the oxblood red and deep space dyes interacted. There's a lot more white space in this design than you would expect from looking at it in the dye tray.

For this towel, I folded the fabric into quarters. Then I accordion pleated the fabric diagonally from one side and then diagonally from the other side. The direction you pleat and apply colors determines the pattern, whether you get a diamond or an "X." This reminds me a bit of weaving, where you can get "rose fashion" or "star fashion" in overshot. In this case, I pleated so the center of the towel was at one end and the four corners were clustered at the other end with the pleats radiating to connect them. I applied peach dye to where I knew the center of the towel would be, forest green where I knew the corners would be, and Cayman blue in between. I used large chunks of ice because by this point, small chunks were not an option.

Because the towel is rectangular rather than square, the diamond in the center looks almost like the marks left from a lipstick kiss.

If I were to do this again, I would use more dye powder. I left a lot of white space in my items. They are pretty, but I feel like they look faded already. The sage green in the infinity scarf did nice things, but I think I needed much more of it. The raspberry pink sort of overwhelms the scarf. On the other hand, it would be easy enough to ice overdye it. The spiral would be difficult to overdye. I might be able to punch up the color in the diamond towel. It may also be that orange dye rather than peach dye would produce brighter results. When I was washing out my items at SEFAA, a couple of the ladies mentioned that fiber reactive dyes are like spices in that they have a shelf life. If I try this again, I know to be less stingy about the dye.

Jess sells ice dyeing kits in her shop and online. For the kits, she has the dye powder and soda ash in a shaker. She said it works, but not as well as pre-soaking the items. Still, this is super easy. You could definitely do it with older children, maybe age 8 and up? They need to be responsible with the dye — keep it away from wind and noses so you don't inhale it — and have reasonable motor skills. And they need to be able to do it and then walk away and let it sit.

Apparently this is the second time SEFAA has had Jess come teach. She is a great teacher! She has good handouts with lots of ideas for different ways to make patterns. She brought a whole rack of samples, lots of different dye colors, and lots of blank garments to dye. We got into a conversation about how difficult it is to find blank 100% cotton items to dye, because often the cloth is cotton but the garment is assembled with polyester thread. If somebody out there wants to start a company, Dharma Trading Company has some items, but we crafters could use a second source for nice clothing blanks in 100% cotton, silk, wool, linen and the like ready to be dyed with the appropriate dye stuff. I like to think Jess will be back next year for more dyeing adventures!