Sunday, February 08, 2009

Salt Dyeing

I've been interested to read the threads on various lists I'm on about snow dyeing, but as it's forecast to be 35 degrees C today (95 degrees F)in my part of in New Zealand, I decided to try something different - salt dyeing. I have a big bag of salt leftover from the days when I was erroneously taught that salt was a requirement for ALL dyeing, so I dug it out and mixed some Golden Yellow powder with it.
Then I sprinkled some on a soda-soaked fat quarter. I wore a mask throughout, and misted the powder/salt mixture once on the fabric.
I mixed a bit of red into the powder, and added that here and there, along with the odd bit of blue.
The result was quite muted in colour as there was far more salt than dye. The effect is different from LWI dyeing. Here's some other pieces:

Mainly blue with some red/yellow - Before and After I added some Warm Black to this one and like the effect - very like looking at mountains and rugged terrain from the air. We dyers are generally taught that spotting is bad, but this technique will produce some spots or considerable amounts of spots, and these can be used to effect.
This is Warm Black again, lightly dusted onto an already dyed piece of fabric. The multiple colours that blacks are made of makes an interesting effect.

5 comments:

Michele/TextileTraveler said...

Interesting results; thanks for posting this. I've tried this technique on silk before and got deep/rich colors. I'm going to try it on cotton one of these days.

Wil said...

An interesting technique which I have to try too :-). I had the chance to snow dye once, maybe a second time this week but that will be all.

Joyce said...

I never heard of salt dyeing but now I want to try it along with snow dyeing. I guess you won't be trying snow dyeing any time soon!

Julie said...

This will be another one for me to try :o) I wouldn't mind the spotting effects of the dye particles at all and I like the subtle results. I'll look forward to seeing the results of your new dye batch too.

Sheila said...

Those are interesting pictures of your dyeing process. fun.