Snow Dyeing with a Twist

Over at the ...Fire Blog this month, TieDye Judy has a post about scrunch dyeing (here).  I decided to take advantage of our wonderful snow (and the freezing temperatures that make it wonderful) and do some scrunch dyeing.  But wait!  There's more!

Of course, I have to add my own twist -- this time in the form of folded shibori dyeing called itajime.  

A lot of people who do snow-dyeing have fancy racks with screens set up so that the snow and dye can drip through the fabric.  I usually just put the snow on top and let the fabric sit in the soup of melted snow and dye while it batches in the up-cycled plastic lettuce boxes I like to use for dyeing.

But I hate wasting dye and I thought: what if I used fabric as a rack for the scrunched fabric?  I figured I would get pastel coordinating fabrics with interesting patterns to go with my snow-dyes.  So I folded up some soda-soaked fabrics and laid them in the bottom of the boxes and scrunched up more to sit on top.


I packed on a layer of the powdery snow and poured my dye concentrate over.  Then came the hard part...letting them batch overnight.

I put the boxes in a really big plastic box and left them in the front hallway overnight.

I prefer to use pure colors for most of my dyeing because I like to mix the colors myself.  But for snow-dyeing, I purchased a couple of already mixed colors -- a couple of browns and some blues -- because I never know just what is going to come out in the wash.

Of course I got fabulously patterned snow-dyes.  

But the real surprise was underneath.  No pale coordinates here.  I got these amazing bits.   I may add some of these to the to-be-overdyed-later pile because they might benefit from some more color, but maybe not.

I am linking up with Nina Marie at Off the Wall Fridays.