Dyeing with snow – further results

On Sunday, snowfall stopped to give me break and take a stock of what I had done during the storm.

After washing and ironing I am very pleased with the results – especially with the increase of knowledge that I went through in these few days! Although I have to admit that I don’t like every piece equally well…

Let me show you a few pictures, with explanations of what I did.

This is Brown Rose after washing. Certainly a very characteristic piece.

This is the first blue.

Another blue, from a different mixture:

This was turquoise, very thinly mixed, and yellow, both distributed on the same layer of snow:

When dyeing you are bound to come up with results that you don’t like. Usually I put those back into the cellar right away to be dyed again with another color the next time. Here is an older piece of magenta, overdyed with brown:

This is a piece of linnen which had not been soaked in soda ash beforehand. I had wanted to find out how the pattern changes when the soda is applied after the color. However, I had forgotten that it was this piece, and when I remembered I had already rinsed it partly, so the soaking in soda ash took place with only a limited amount of color left. Pretty interesting chameleon-fabric, I’d say!

One time I did not use a flat tub but put the fabric into a flowering pot where the melting snow could exit through the holes in the bottom. The first snow layer was soaked with yellow

and a second layer after the first one had melted was soaked with blue.

This is the first piece, which thus went through two colorings, no rearrangement took place.

This is the second piece which was put on top and dyed blue. Here you can see very well that the closer arrangement of the fabric in the smaller container caused a more crunched-up layering and resulted in larger white areas. I will definitely overdye this piece with another shade of blue.

And last not least a detail from a piece that was dyed with a color „avocado“. As with brown rose you can see that the components in the mixed powders have different reaction times.

I must say, dyeing with snow certainly is a lot of fun and to my liking. I love experiments, even if (or should I say exactly because?) I don’t know what exactly will happen. However, I don’t consider all the pieces that I made during this past snow storm equally usable. But then that’s a question of taste, too. Let me know your favorites, I'd be interested to find out about other people's tastes in this regard!

I'm very satisfied with the fact that I choose to go for bigger pieces of fabric right away rather than doing Fat Quarter sized samples. Large expanses squeezed into smaller containers give more patterning!

During the next storm I will stick to the simple colors and see what happens to the patterns depending on how you manipulate the fabric , crunching it up, twisting it, perhaps even knotting, who knows. I also have a few shibori-style pieces in the waiting into which I bound up pebbles. That might be interesting, too.

They are calling for more snow tomorrow – and what else is there to do on Christmas Eve than think about dyeing with snow…