Meanderings of a Mermaid

Last winter I played with some organic geode ice dyeing. Now this year I am trying my hand at folded ice dyeing. So far I have been working with cotton cloth. Three projects are completed.  The artist Susan Purney Mark has a nice video workshop if you want to learn about this technique. Also it is worth going to see her gallery.  This piece is an almost square tablecloth. I folded it into triangles , as well as I could. And I used four colours. Wedgewood blue, lapis blue, rust orange and burgundy. I have not decided if this will stay as a tablecloth or become something else.  This second piece is a cotton blouse. I applied two dye colours here. I was trying to fold the cloth into little squares. The back and front are virtually identical.  This third piece was a table runner found at the thrift store. It is a double thickness of fabric.  As you can tell, I folded things on a diagonal here. I used a jet black, ice blue and clear yellow. This one makes me think of...

  This story starts with the terrific suggestion of friend BG to try out some ice dyeing. For both of us it was the first time doing this dye technique. The pictures in this blog will all be of my project. She worked with rayon and I took linen curtains from the thrift store.  The very first step, and not shown here, was to launder my piece of fabric. Although the fabric may be new, you want to remove all sizing and any possible dirt. I washed it with Synthrapol soap in the machine.  In the first photo is a shot of dye day #1. Into four gallons of cool, softened water I put four cups of wash soda. Stir around to dissolve. Add the clean cloth and push it down repeatedly so it is submerged in the liquid. I left mine for about 30 minutes. Occasionally I shifted the fabric around a bit.  Then I dumped out the mordant liquid, the wash soda in water. I wrung out the cloth as well as I could. My piece of cloth is a medium weight linen and measures 57" wide and 96" long....