‘We can make this ourselves’ must be the most used comment in our household. So when my daughter wanted a new duvet cover for Christmas I had to put my money where my mouth is and start to research how to dye a double duvet and two pillow cases.
We fell in love with a technique that we have never used before, Ice dyeing, which creates soft flowing patterns and blends the colours beautifully. To get the right colour combination we produced a few test pieces and settled on the following colours; navy, turquoise and bubble gum using Procion Dyes.
To deal with the sheer size of the fabrics I had to use my old bath that we saved for projects like this when we redecorated our bathrooms. A mesh of chicken wire was suspended over some bricks in the bottom of the bath so that the melt water could drain away from the fabric. The fabric, previously soaked in a soda ash solution, was loosely pleated coiled up and placed directly on the wire mesh.
My next problem arose when I placed all the ice cubes on top of my fabrics and they started to slip off. I had to deal quickly with this problem as the ice was melting! So I packed the fabrics with all our crocks which prevented the ice slipping. Once all this was in place I only had to sprinkle the dye power over the ice cubes, cover the bath with a tarpaulin and wait 24 hours.
Original Textile Art