This....
Became these...
Fabric placed underneath tray to catch run-off
Fabric scrunched on top of tray--note imprint of wire rack in colors. Great texture!
And this...
Became these...
Folded on top of rack
Wadded up on top of rack. This one got much more "watercolor-y" results. Very cool.
And finally, this rather gruesome-looking mess...
became these...
Fabric placed under rack to catch run-off. I laughingly called this on "The Hand of God" because the pattern in the middle looks like an open hand to me.
Scrunched on top of the rack. This one was probably the winner in the "Interesting" contest.
The last one was the crowd favorite at my guild meeting last night. Had to watch people to keep them from sneaking it out in their bags! Tee hee. I had them try to guess what two colors I started with and they couldn't. That's the beauty of this process, really: it's unpredictability. The teal dye completely broke into its component colors, and the purple partially broke. I really dig all the grays that turned up.
I don't know that this is a method I'll use often. It does use a lot of extra dye and it's messier and more of a pain to do than standard low-water immersion methods I've been using. However, I'm thinking through ways I might be able to edit the process and do it in my basement dye studio to decrease some of the variables--not to control the results (this method is all about surprise endings!) but to control the mess!
One happy "mistake"--when doing this method outdoors one of the big issues is dye powder blowing where it shouldn't. In this instance, one of my blue/yellow fabrics ended up with a bit of a stain of a different color dye that blew onto it from one of the other ice baths. You can't really see it well in these pictures, but dang if it didn't turn out to be almost the exact color orange I was shooting for in my Sedona Series. So now I have another possible color combination to play with that hadn't occurred to me before.
That's what I love best about hand-dyeing. I'm learning a TON about color!