Snow Dyeing Tutorial and Grannyland…

Well I haven’t posted much over the last week or so as I’ve been off in grannyland. After organizing the closet and seeing all of the leftover bits of yarn I decided that I’d whip up a couple of granny square afghans. Did I say whip up? Make that a slow and steady slog and maybe it’ll only be one afghan at present. I must admit though I have finished off several of the left-over balls of yarn.

A work in progress, 127 squares shown finished and in the process of being finished. Not sure how many more I’ll need, I’ll have to lay them out on the bed.

I went to see AC/DC in November at the Rogers Centre. I ‘d only gotten one ticket for that show but they put on another show January 9th and I managed to get six tickets for that one – two single floor seats and four together up in the 500 nosebleed level. I won’t go into describing this show as it was the same as I the one I blogged last time except to say there was a comment left in my blog about the cartoon at the opening of the act being a bit racy. I hadn’t noticed because I was too busy trying to operate my cell phone. LOL, whatcha talking about? Yes to whomever blogged, you’re right it was a bit cheeky. Fantastic show made only better by the fact that I was eleven rows back dead centre this time. Hey I could actually see the expressions on the band’s faces this time around.

Anyhow I did sneak in my camera – said camera not being as good as some of the new iphones but I did catch two (yes count two) pictures that weren’t a disaster and some fairly good movie clips which I won’t show as I’m too chicken to risk copyright infringement but I will show you this picture

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Rosie! If you’re a fan you’ll know who she is, enough said.

Well I got a little stir crazy from sitting around crocheting all the granny squares so I took a break and decided to do some snow-dyeing for an upcoming swap I’m hosting for my fabric dyeing forum. I’ve done a series of photos like a tutorial which I’ll post below.

Snow and dye ready to go.

Arranging material onto a rack in laundry tub.

Layering snow on top of material.

Adding the first dye – Boysenberry from ProChem.

Adding the second dye – Golden Yellow from ProChem.

Adding the third dye – Cerulean Blue from Dharma.

Dye starting to melt.

And melting…

And melted.

Washed and ironed piece of fabric. This was a left-over piece of fabric that I had sitting around. I can’t remember but it’s either P&B’s 108″ dyer’s cloth or it’s the PFD 108″ from Marshall. Nothing wrong with the fabric but the extra-wides don’t produce quite the same sharpness as the 45″ material.

This picture shows a corner of the fabric where the material was more exposed and had less snow on it so less blending of colours.

This is the second piece of fabric that I did for the swap using the standard 45″ wide P&B. I used more dye on this especially the Boysenberry and it’s reflected by having a more purple-red cast to it. This was done the next day and we’d had warmer tempratures and the snow was starting to melt and compact. It was very hard to work with the snow (fluffy is easiest) so what I did was to take a plastic lid and press the snow into the lid and then flip it over on top of the material. I didn’t layer as much snow because I was trying to get a more intense colour. I think that is the reason I had globs of colour throughout the piece. I’m thinking the dye broke through the thinner areas of snow. All in all I actually like the colours on the first piece of material better.

I also did an experiment with a jar and smaller pieces of fabric I had. I took the snow and fabric and layered them in the jar but I’ll post that another day as the pieces really weren’t that big and the whole thing didn’t work out as well but I feel it’s worth showing if only to show what you get from a failed experiment.

Karen