Snow Dyeing

Snow in Vienna! This is rather rare. But at the moment we do have some snow and I seized the opportunity to snow-dye (is this a word?) some fabric.

I cut my fabric into fat quarters and soaked it in a soda ash solution.

Then I put the fat quarters into individual containers. I folded some of them and simply scrunched the rest.

I gathered some buckets of snow on my balcony

and covered the fabric with it.

Then I sprinckled some dye onto the snow (I use Procion). I used way too much dye - next time I will be more careful. This all happened in my bathtub.

I put the containers in garbage bags and put them out on my balcony. The advantage - the whole thing was out of the way. The disadvantage (which might have been solved with a little bit of thinking in advance) - the snow did not melt. So after a few hours I put the bags inside.

The next day I visited my aunt and only got home in the evening. The snow on the fabric was gone and the water with the dye covered the bottom of the containers. So the fabric did soak up the colors from the bottom for a few hours which diminished the effect of the snow dyeing.

But after a lot of rinsing, some washing and ironing I got these beautiful pieces of fabric. I really love them.

In fact I like the colors so much that I couldn't throw away the threads that unraveled from the fabrics.

As the weather report promises some more snow in the next days I will probably start another snow dyeing session but this time I will put the fabric on a grill so that the melted snow can run through the fabric. I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm linking this post to Nina-Marie's "Off the Wall Friday". 

Loot!

I was at the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham (GB) and as usual it was a great show. See pictures of the quilts at www.quiltartnews.com.

But there was a very large vendor mall as well and I couldn't resist to buy some fabric.

These fat quarters of Kaffe Fassett fabric are supposed to go into my hexagon quilt (read about it here) and make it more sparkling.

And these neutral fabrics (together with a lot of others from my stash) will become a quilt for my mother - a gift for her 75th anniversary in November (but hush - don't tell her!).