Green Cascade quilt

A small quilt I can create within 2-3 days. If the size is bigger, it will take longer, but this quilt holds the record :-). I posted about this ice cube dyed fabric in this post of October 11, 2013 and about the quilting in this post of Augst 16, 2014. And after that I needed time to think about what I wanted to do with the quilt.

I knew that I wanted it to be more textural, but the cord I had dyed with the fabric was not usable. The centre of the cord was cotton fiber, but it was covered with a polyester net. I found other 100% cotton cord and dyed this. The scary part was to punch holes through the quilt. Originally the fabric was approximately 40" long and the widt of the fabric but as you can see the final result is much smaller. The cords pulled up the fabric creating this rippling which I love.

As I want to see this on a bigger scale I snow dyed a 3 yard piece of fabric in a different color scheme. Here is a picture of half the fabric:

 I did this last month and at the moment the quilt is waiting to be quilted. Hopefully this will not take as long as the green one :-)

ice cubes

There are different ways of using ice cubes in dyeing. In this case I made dye concentate and froze this into ice cubes containers. I have special ones for dyeing purposes.

In a big container I placed a soda soaked piece of fabric and placed a number of ice cubes on top of it. I used a yellow one and two different blues.

Covered everything with a second piece of fabric and left it there till the ice cubes were melted.

After rinsing and washing these are the fabrics:

The top one was the fabric which was on top. I can see that because there are more white or very lightly colored areas.

ice cube dyeing

Many quilts I make are small, but now and then I want to create something big. Not certain exactly how big it will be, but I cut a piece of fabric of around 45". This plus a long piece of cotton rope I placed in a gutter after I soda soaked it. On top of this I put a lot of ice cubes and dye powder. Two colors of blue and two of yellow. I let this batch till the next day. After rinsing and washing it looks now like this:

 

The fabric is from P&B (a pfd), but apparently the cotton rope was not pfd. I bought this at JoAnn. The same dye bath, but the result is different. No problem in this case, because I can use it. However if you were aiming for a similar effect, it would have been an unpleasant surprise.
I am linking this to Nina-Marie's Off the Wall Friday's.

Combining 2 techniques

When I read this blog post, I got the idea of combining kanoko (tied) shibori with ice cube dying. Ice cubes because snow is not there and ice cubes are available in the store :-). Luckily I have a big supply of buttons and after some time my fq looked like this:



 I soaked the fabric and placed it in a glass vase, sprinkled dye powder over it (avocado, alpine blue and black), topped it up with ice cubes till it was like this:

 And left it till the next day. After rinsing, washing and drying this is how it turned out:

I love it! More fabric will be dyed like this, that is for certain.

ice cube dyeing

Ice cube dyeing is not new to me, but on Linda's blog I read about a variation to this technique. There happen to be some frozen dye ice cubes in my freezer, so time to play. No idea which colors they were. Whenever I have some left over dye I freeze it. This technique uses 2 layers of fabric. One on which you put the ice cubes:
And one which you put on top:

I must say I like the top fabric the most. If you look closely to the fabric you might see that I had placed bubblewrap under and over the fabric. In some areas there is a nice imprint of the bubbles.

ice cube dyeing

About 2 months ago there was a discussion on the DyersList on how long procion dyes could be kept frozen. According to a number of members the strenght of the color would disappear very quickly. Well I can say that I have proof that they are wrong. This picture shows the fabric I dyed using frozen dyeconcentrate which was one day old:
I emptied different blue dye concentrate - one was turquoise, I think the other one was mixing blue but I am not 100 certain on that - into an ice cube container. Put it into the freezer till the next day. Soda soaked fabric was crunched into a container and the ice cubes were placed on the fabric where they melted. I did not use all the ice cubes and put the remaining ones back into the freezer. This was done on February 24.
This week I used up the ice cubes and this is the fabric which I dyed with them:

As you can see I had more turquoise ice cubes on this fabric. When the dye concentrate is in the ice cube container it is practically impossible to see which colors are there. The ice cubes were 4 months old, but the colors are still as vibrant as when they were fresh.

ice cube dyeing

Quite often you end up with little quantities of dye mixture. Of course you can throw this away, but you can also pour this into ice cube trays. The fun part is that when the dye mixture is in the tray you cannot see anymore which color it was. Serendepity! Next day I soda soaked 2 fq's of fabric and crunched these into a container. On this fabric I emptied an ice cube tray which held different colors of dye mixture and let it melt. When the ice cubes were melting I could slowly see some of the colors, but in total the fabric still looked very dark. After rinsing and washing this is how it looks:



There are different opinions on how long you can keep the dye mixture frozen, but this fabric was down with 1-day old ice cubes. In my freezer are some ice cubes which are by now several months old. One of the coming days I intend to use these and see how much color they still have.