My sister was here for the weekend and we had no big plans so since it was a crazy hot day we decided to try some ice dyeing. A great day for melting ice! I had a collection of random dyes from a whole bunch of previous projects that needed to be used up so we got a collection of t-shirts and napkins and set up some ice dyeing in the driveway.

Although I have taught dozens of dye classes, I have never actually done ice dyeing before. It seems pretty straight-forward, but I decided to look up some instructions to make sure there wasn’t anything I was missing. The first thing I noticed is that there are WILDLY different instructions for ice dyeing. I am not going to link to any of the ones I’ve read because I am not sure any of them actually work.

  • One said to dissolve 2 cups of soda ash in a gallon of warm water; the next one said 1/4 c per gallon.
  • One said to let it sit for 24 hours after the ice was melted; another said to rinse them right away.
  • One said that the dye had to go on top of the ice; one said it had to go underneath. (I can’t see how this possibly could make any difference.)

I went with what seemed like the most likely thing to work based on what I know about these dyes. So we soaked some things in soda ash, crumpled them up on mesh drying racks and various things from the garage, covered them with ice and sprinkled on some dye. I had 3 different reds/pinks, 3 different yellows, navy, blue, purple and two blacks. It was almost 90 degrees so we let them sit and bake out in the sun for about 6 hours. I brought everything in and loaded it into the washer. I rinsed some loose dye off of a couple of pieces, but I didn’t do a big rinse step, which was probably my mistake.

(Note, I don’t need any crowd-sourced dye lessons here. I’ve taught with these dyes a lot and I know exactly what I’d do differently another time.)

One of the cool things about ice dyeing is the tendency of colors to “fracture” and separate out into their components. I’ve seen examples where they do all kinds of unpredictable color shifts. Some of the dye companies sell dyes that do this on purpose. It just so happens that the majority of colors I happened to have (purple, black, blue, red) all blended, shifted or broke apart to make purple. Because basically everything we made turned out purple. And to compound that, a lot of the dye did not complete the chemical reaction where it locks into the fiber (I think it was very slowed down by the ice) so a lot of loose dye made it’s way into every crack and crevasse and filled in everything with purple.

Some of the pieces are pretty; my sister and her hubby got a couple of cool purple t-shirts. But it didn’t really wow me in any way. We could have gotten the same results just pouring the dye over the pieces. Some of them are just ugly. I am going to think about how I can overdye them or maybe try some glue batik to make some purple and black Halloween themed things.