Snow Dyeing Season is Now Open

© 2010 BJ Parady

My backyard has looked like this for three days now. Only today did I realize that I could now open my snow dyeing season–and it turns out that this snow is a perfect texture for my purposes…to create some new backgrounds. It’s light and fluffy, with small crystals.

© 2010 BJ Parady

First I tied up some bundles of various fabrics–some I loosely pleated, then wrapped with string; some, like this one above, is more of a tie-dyed pattern. Next I soaked them in a soda ash solution.

© 2010 BJ Parady

Here they are lying in a plastic under-the-bed tub, ready for the snow. Some pieces have already been dyed once–I’m overdyeing them because they have too much variation, or because I wasn’t happy with the color. You can only do this so many times before the receptors in the fabric get loaded, but I hope these are good for one more trip through the dye.

© 2010 BJ Parady

The camera had trouble focusing on the snow, so this picture is a little blurry. But what I did was go out the back door and scoop up a couple of plastic bowls of snow. I then mixed the dye powder into each bowl (after one was split into another part), and spread it out over the bundles. More of one color here than there, but fairly randomly.

Now the snow is melting slowly–and so the dye is dispersing slowly. Not only is the reaction slowed down by the cold, but the process separates out the base colors used to make the mixed dyes. Usually I get some pretty cool results….I’ll show you these in a couple of days after they sit and stew and then get washed out.