on June 28, 2019
When you start out, it can be hard to know how much dye to apply in ice dyeing. This is especially true if you’re applying it powder-over-ice, where not only is it not hitting the fabric immediately, but there’s a layer of ice obscuring your view anyway.
I’ll admit, I didn’t really measure dye when I started out — I just sprinkled on whatever seemed like a good amount, and waited to see what would happen. Sometimes I got the effect I wanted. Sometimes I didn’t. I pretty quickly developed a sense of how densely to sprinkle the dye in order to get good color. It took much longer to work out which dyes are more powerful than normal, so I could use less of them. (If you’ve heard the phrase “red rushes in,” I find this to be often but not always true.)
This post is intended to give you (and me!) a rough visual guide to how much dye to use and what kind of color you might expect. I make no attempt to deal with the overpowering nature of some colors — the samples below are all dyed with a single color, Lapis, which has the advantage of splitting nicely. They’re all adult medium T-shirts, scrunched, and are dyed powder-over-ice on a rack.
What I like most about this experiment is that all of the T-shirts look nice; the intensity is different, but they all display the kinds of patterns that first attracted me to ice dyeing.
Very useful controlled test. I love the lapis in all 4 intensities of ice dye, but am thinking the top one (1/8) will be a good approach for baby clothes (so perhaps 1/16th on a couple onesies, or 1.8 over 5-6 onsies in mass production, he he).
My second fav is the 1/2 teaspoon, but I am thinking even better would be 3/4 teaspoon — in between number 3 and number 4 above.
COOL.
Wow. Thank you so much for posting that. Who knew that 1/8th of a tsp would produce such beautiful results. I love the split going on with the Lapis. I am currently working on a quilt project and looking for the perfect background colour. That’s it!! Of course, I have every colour but that lol?? Question: Do you cover your project with a single layer of strategically placed cubes, or just pile it on? What method did you use for the results in your dye colour gallery!
I have almost always just piled the ice on, aiming for roughly a single layer but not being too worried about it. I have it on my list to see whether being more careful with the ice makes a noticeable difference.
As for the gallery, each swatch (about 5″ x 7″) is muck-dyed powder-over-ice, with about 1/8th teaspoon of dye. That’s a lot of dye for that little piece! If I had it to do over again, I might choose different parameters, but I started the swatches early in my ice dyeing life.
I am going to start putting together color swatches and would like to know how big would you use for a swatch if you were doing it over.
Thank you for the very informative website. I love ice dye and I am new to it so reading as much as I can online. Then trying things out has been a lot of fun!
Any advice from the group would be appreciated.
Thanks so much!
If I had all the money and space in the world, I’d love to do fat-quarters for my samples. However, I have more than 80 dye colors, and am currently working on creating three swatches for each of them: one muck-dyed, one ice-dyed on a rack, and one low water immersion. Doing all those samples with fat quarters would require something like 60 yards of fabric!
Alternately, I’m thinking of looking for smaller measuring spoons. I feel fairly confident in my ability to eyeball half of a quarter teaspoon, which is what I typically do for swatches, but I wouldn’t go lower than that. If I were really serious about manipulating the amount of dye, I’d get a sensitive scale and do it by weight, but I’m clearly a bit more ad-hoc than that.
At this point I’ve decided that the swatches, for me, are just to have a visual record of how much the dye splits and what colors I can expect in the final product, and don’t tell me anything about how much dye to use. I figure out the amount of dye mostly by feel, which is… well, not completely reliable, but I’ve gotten better at it over time.
Sorry if that isn’t very helpful!
Holly,
I used old white 100% cotton sheets for my samples. They are a bit large at 18” squares however you get a very good idea how each color splits. I’m awful at figuring out how much dye to use and know I use way too much by how dark the water is once the ice has melted. I plan on trying to really cut back when attempting snow dyeing later in the year.
Jill