I’m going to start off by saying, I’ve been woefully neglecting this blog….I had always thought I would utilize this more. So I will begin to post about different techniques and whatnot here :) Over the years I’ve heard a lot of repeat questions that could definitely be addressed here and also it’s just really cool to learn about how everything is made! I found myself in a bit of a rut over winter, where I was filling my evenings with TV and phone scrolling *insert face palm emoji*….so this is a much better use of my evening time. It’s a bit intimidating for me! Haha….my favourite line from recent sub conversations about this subject is currently….”I don’t want it to be a dry read, I feel like I AM a dry read” lol.
So anyways….rambling….today I will start with Ice Dying! Ahead of the upcoming Art warp….which, as you probably guessed….incorporates an ice dying technique.
I live in Canada….so there’s plenty of shoulder season weather, that’s perfect for this kind of thing :) You can even use just plain old snow when it’s everywhere, lol! I will get more into that as we go on…but for now, it’s Ice. The idea of utilizing this technique is to give some form of marbled affect. So many variables account for the finished Dye pattern that everytime is totally unique!
I’m going to interject here to add a little pictorial of a different Ice dye project I did recently for the Arda & Henry line :) it’s a nice little start to finish. You’ll start to see, as I continue these blogs, that I do a lot of different setups for projects lol…but they’re all very unique!
Yarn Layout:
Ice:
Dye layer #1…Lights:
Dye Layer #2….Darks:
Pre Rinse (still a bit of ice in the morning):
The finished warp! This one turned out beautifully as well :) but a very different style than the one I’m showcasing today:
I had initially started this with a different paragraph….and now here I am back at the beginning, because I realized I jumped ahead and missed some of the basics. So I guess I should start with underlay! What are we putting it on?…..basic, yes….very important, also yes. There are lots of options for mess containment…which I won’t be getting into right now…so essentially it comes down to screen or no screen. The difference being, whether or not you want the dye to pass right through or pool into the yarn. So this is going to be our first important variable….the set up. The more pooling you allow, the more blended your finished look. In this warp we’re looking at today, I opted for quite a bit of pooling. It’s all shades of brown and I wanted them thoroughly blended. I did this by laying my plastic down over some sticks and small boards to create little valleys…and then poked holes in various locations for more drainage:)
The next important variable is Time…how long does it take your ice to melt? The slower the melt, the more evenly the dye is going to bleed into each other and the more evenly it will dye the entire piece. Too slow and it’s going to very blended, too fast and you’ll end up with very dark marbling and areas of no dye at all. So playing around with different temperatures and amounts of ice is a fun exploration and is a good Spring/Fall outdoor activity….because you can try different outdoor temperatures :) For this particular piece you can see I went with varying thickness of ice, on only portions of the warp (which we’ll get into more detail moving forward) and it’s a cool Autumn day. I left this overnight and it was a pretty slow melt :)
Next I’m going to roll into the Ice Vs Snow as my next variable :) The yarn is going to get dyed from the ice melting and the dye powder running into it….it’s going to go the path of least resistance, so to speak….so the larger the ice, the more it’s going to marble. The dye will run off the outside into the crevices, before the cube melts….making these crevices areas darker and the original ice spots lighter…. this is also where the drainage comes into play…if you have full drainage this will be more prominent, whereas pooling will darken these Ice areas.
Subsequently, the smaller your ice pieces get the more blended your colors…snow being the most uniformly blended.
I opted for a mix of big cubes and crushed ice on this piece.
The last variable I’m going to touch base on today is Dye placement. This particular warp is a Mixed Silks warp and it’s an Acid dye technique….so it was pre soaked in an “acid” bath and then I sprinkled citric acid onto the ice before the dye. I do soak the “base” dyed fibres before hand as well…but don’t often sprinkle more of the soda ash onto the ice….I just like to be extra sure with the acids :) Now the fun part! Experimenting with the dye spreading is super fun….basically less powder/less colour and visa versa, and then just creating color blends. I try to keep them into general colour groupings and if you just cover the whole thing with all the same colours there will be no variation…but other than that, you can just put it where you see fit and let the ice do it’s thing! It’s always a surprise :)
I wanted to also incorporate some speckling into this overall…so I started, pre ice, with a bit of all over speckling and finished this piece off with some blue speckling to fit my inspiration and baked it in the oven…this is where the plastic comes in handy as apposed to dying on mesh or a grate…but that’s still possible with an Acid dye, just needs a bit more finessing ;) You can see how wonderfully the pooling blended the browns, while still having features of the random ice dying :)
So that’s the end of this little instalment! I will be blogging some fun updates on projects, as well as more technical bits, moving forward :)
