I’m cutting out green and yellow fabric I snow dyed this winter for a new project. I realised I didn’t have quite enough so I decided to try some outdoor ice dyeing yesterday
So a quick ripp off the bolts and a soda ash bath and we went in for round two.
I reused much of the ice so the blue-ish tints are more easily explained.
I’m just baffled. The only two explanations I can come up with are
1- the green had some real cracking blue
2- did I somehow grab the wrong prebatched bottle of dye? And miss that I was spraying blue?
My thought is that the green dye was actually a mix of blue and yellow, sounds like they separated somehow. Bummer you don’t get the desired green cloth but the results are great!
I’m glad you were finally able to get the green you were going for, though the blues were also very lovely.
Question for you: Are you certain your fabric was 100% cotton? Could there have been any polyester content in it? Even a small amount?
In grad school I designed a production of the Imaginary Invalid, set in the 1910’s, in Michigan, with the work of a contemporary cartoonist (Windsor McKay) as the inspiration for the characters and colors. The sassy Maid, wore a distinctive pink & yellow striped dress, with a cornflower blue pinafore apron over it. Later she needed to wear a green surgical gown and hat, with the pink & yellow stripe visible beneath it. (The audience needed to see & understand that the Maid was simply dressing up in a disguise as the Surgeon, but the “Invalid” needed to believe the disguise.) We had a white pinafore apron in stock, that I was given permission to dye blue, as we didn’t have enough time to build a blue one. (And we had already bought a vintage linen surgical gown in the right color.)
But no matter how much blue dye we used, the white apron kept coming out the same medium green as the surgical gown. We tried every shade of blue, up through navy, and the white apron just kept coming out green. When we did a burn test on a few fibers later, we discovered the apron we thought was all cotton, was a poly blend, and it would only absorb green parts of the blue dye. The apron never became blue, and one of the Drapers ended up taking a pattern off it, and whipping up a new one over the weekend, because he was bored, and he liked me.
AIMR
(Linda -2026 time to regroup and renew :us:)
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ahhh…I made beet salad and wanted to use the beet water to dye a small piece of what I thought was all cotton. It barely took the dye. I suspect it has some poly in it. It is a pink. The paper I dyed was a vivid red but it was 100% cotton rag.
I am not super versed in dyeing and processes, but could the green have broken and the yellow portion of the green didn’t take to the fabric? It’s so strange, but a happy accident I would say! I adore the accidental raccoon in the party hat.
Oh that raccoon in the party hat is everything, I love a happy accident.
Adding to the great theories above - with ice dyeing the strike rate is so much slower than warm dyeing that the dye components really do have time to separate as the ice melts. A lot of greens sold as “single” fiber-reactive colors are actually a mix of a yellow primary and a turquoise/cyan primary, and the cyan tends to strike faster on cotton than the yellow does. So the puddles closest to where the ice sat longest end up reading much more blue than the rest. I had a “forest green” Procion split into teal pools and dusty olive edges on the same piece for the same reason once.
If you ever want to test it, a strip of fabric in a flat tray with just a couple of ice cubes and one spoonful of “green” dye will show the gradient really clearly. Kind of a fun little experiment, and the results are usually pretty in spite of themselves.
