Round two of snow dyeing

Here’s Round Two of my snow dyeing experiments. I’m glad I did it. I confirmed that I will probably never love dyeing. It’s a lot of work for something so unpredictable. I had one tub of fabrics that I poured brown over and then added additional colors on top of that. For some reason, none of the brown dye took at all. Maybe it was too old? The other colors worked, but not the brown and, since I wanted predominately brown, the end result was mostly white. Of course, theoretically I can set those fabrics aside and overdye them, but now that all of the mess is put away, it will probably be another ten years before I take it out again.

I do think there were some really beautiful areas in the fabrics from the other bins. For two of the bins, I just layed the fabric right on the bottom and piled the snow on top. For the other one, I used the grid again, only this time I poked bits of fabric into each hole of the grid (see first picture below). The second and last pictures below shows the result of that experiment. It didn’t give me any kind of grid pattern, but it did create more peaks and valleys, which gave some nice patterning. I pleated a couple of pieces, too, which gave a nice stripe effect.

The other thing I did this time was to mix up more colors. I made the fuchsia, yellow, and cyan and then used those to mix orange, green, and violet. I was still trying to do a sort of color wheel, none too successfully. The main thing I learned is that fuchsia is a really agressive color that likes to take over. Even when yellow and fuchsia are mixed about 5:1, it still looks pretty much fuchsia. Yellow gets overwhelmed very quickly.

Now my question is what to do with this fabric? Does anyone have pictures of quilts they’ve made with hand-dyed fabrics that are similar to these? I know there are many quilters that use hand-dyes, but most of the ones I can remember are more solid dyes.

Okay, I’m done with snow dyeing, so the snow can all melt now and doesn’t need to come back 🙂