Ice-Cube-Dyeing: Report in German "Patchwork Professional" magazine

In December I wrote about our heaps of snow, their effect on my dyeing, and presented a few results. When I was busy ironing the first wonderfully colorful and lively results I started thinking about water and its functionality in dyeing. 

Experiment with snow, this time in a flower pot...

These thoughts turned into a sort of meditation, after all I was still ironing the traditional way, not my most favourite activity in the world and one has to do one’s best to enrich that time...

Waiting to be ironed: snow-dyed fabrics on the line

That meditation centered on the state of matter of water, and the influence that might have on the behavior of dyes, and on the results of dyeing processes. When I was finished with my ironing and at the end of my meditation, I had come up with a new idea: ice-cube dyeing.

A few days of experimenting followed, as I still had a sufficient supply of soda-ash-soaked fabric from my snow-dyeing. Our ice-cube trays had been sitting idly in our kitchen cupboards anyway (we usually have a bottle of water in the fridge, that’s cold enough for us.) 

When I had found out what I was doing, I contacted the German magazine Patchwork Professional. The result is now in print – the newest edition hit the newsstalls yesterday.

Title page of the newest edition (03/2011)
 of Patchwork Professional magazine

View inside the magazine

I will probably give a (sort of) English translation of the workshop article here later in the fall.

Meanwhile you can buy fabrics that have been dyed with this technique via my website justcolours.de (sorry – in German only…), under the tag „Stoffunikate“ (unique fabrics). The site is updated frequently, whenever I have a new stack of fabrics finished. Check it out, and enjoy!