Ice Dyeing at the Beach

I just got back from a wonderful get-away for some ice dyeing at Folly Beach. 

After we unpacked the car which could not fit another thing, we set up stations....one for the dyes

one for other extras

and our big table to hold our pans for dyeing.  I had some old marbling trays - AKA cat pans which seem to be a perfect size for so many things. We wet and scrunched our fabric to lay on top of a rack, ready for the ice.

We found many good tutorials online for doing this technique. One suggested we use crushed ice as it stays on top of the fabric without slipping off.  Kate happened to have this old but still working like a charm ice crusher.  It looked mighty familiar to me so I'm thinking I had one of those way back when.

After laying both crushed and whole ice cubes on top of our fabric....

we sprinkled with dye powder.  A small tea strainer seemed to work well, keeping the dyes from clumping and accumulating in one area. It was hard to know how much dye to use.

As the ice melted, the dye touched the fabric and reacted.  Since melting happened at different rates, there were some great effects.

Before covering, we added another piece of fabric on top...just to see what would happen.

Kate's was propped up on a higher wire allowing her to add a piece of fabric in the bottom to catch the drippings.

We thought it may have muddy results, but because the ice melted and dripped with the dye at different rates, it turned out beautiful.

We covered them with plastic and laid in the sun to batch.

We also did a bucket for confetti ice dyeing, each of use contributing a piece to each layer.  We stayed with the same 3 colors except to add a small amount of a 4th color on the top.

It was absolutely beautiful at Folly Beach - this is the view we had while working.

Doesn't get any better.

While taking a break, we tooled around in this fun little golf cart...

and ran into some other interesting passengers.
More to come.