Ice Dyeing Play Day

Our Fyber Cafe group had a play day at my house to do ice dyeing. We were sweating it, the 3 previous days had been 100' but we got very lucky and it cooled down on Wednesday, to 70 for us, just perfect. We set up on wire racks with plastic & wire baskets for the fabric, layered on ice, and then sprinkled dry dye powder over the ice. We used all the baskets and wire racks that I had put out. The big yardage is Clare's, she spiraled each end of her yardage, with blue and purple dyes. Lorraine used a twist from the corner to pattern her fabric with indigo dye.

At the end of the day we were running out of baskets, so I pinned my last pieces of fabric on the clothes line. Using leftover liquid dye concentrates from a previous dye day, I dripped it on the fabrics. I had a lot of black that we did not use, and a limited color palette, no red or yellows.

I ordered silk charmuese scarves if people wanted to dye them, there were a few leftover, so I dyed them, I think I will use them as gifts when I go to the family reunion this summer.

I have been wanting some brown fabric for different applique projects and was having trouble mixing a nice one from turquoise/fuchsia/yellow primary colors. So I ordered Terra Cotta, Dutch chocolate and bronze from Dharma. Bronze is one of our favorite colors, but we really have no idea what color it really is, because it always splits into it's different parts, but it goes with just about any color we mix.

I believe that these are Electric blue & indigo, and Chinese red & fuchsia, with maybe a little terra cotta too, they have not been ironed yet, I just wanted to get something to post on Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday check her blog to see what other talented textile artists are doing this week.

Dye Workshop

What a wonderful weekend, dying fabric and trying to marble fabric. 10 of our artists from "Fyber Cafe" got together and had a dye workshop, this is our 5th annual event. The ice dyeing on the silk scarves worked out beautifully, we all made several scarves and some even dyed yardage. See more details on Fybercafe.blogspot.com It was a hot weekend, 93 on Friday, 104 on Saturday, yikes! We were outside most of Friday, and thankfully her studio had air conditioning. For details of the ice dyeing see previous post here also.

In the afternoon, we did prep work for marbling on Saturday, soaked the fabric in alum, and hung it up to dry. Prepared the goop that is used to float the paint and make the patterns on. Unfortunately we had trouble making the paints the right consistency, for the marbling, and got rather frustrated. A few of us are going to try again on Wednesday at my house.

We did have a great time, opening our scarves after we left them to sit over night. We hung them on a tree and they flapped in the wind and glowed in the sun. The potluck was tasty as always, lots of goodies, including apple crisp and chocolate zucchini bread.