Snow Dyeing Underway

Except for a moment of panic, my snow dyeing experiment is underway! After waiting for ages for enough snow to do this, when I went to start I found that I had no urea.  I did think of peeing into the mixture, which my friend Emily suggested.  You do wear gloves after all, but then after some advice from a friend (thanks Kathy) I decided I probably didn't need it for this application and moved ahead with my plans urine free.

I had no urea because someone I know was trying to be helpful one day and used a gallon of mixed urea to water my tomoato plants and basil.....ugh!  I couldn't imagine why my plants had suddenly shrivelled up and turned brown!  Then when I went to look fo my urea, I deduced enough to inquire further to see what happened....mmmm hmmmm!  Now, mind you, I had drawn a skull and crossbone on it but we didn't know each other very well at that time.  His sight is not what it should be.  I better go and mark my soda ash water with neon markers!  I'll be ordering some more asap, but Pro Chem is on vacation right now.

We'll find out tomorrow how it looks, but this is what it looks like right now in my garage fabric all scrunched up with snow piled over it and dye squirted all over in 3 colors on the left, deep yellow, Chinese red and cerulean blue.  On the right are 2 colors, yellow and blue. 

 



I used a couple of old dish pans that are dedicated to dyeing and a couple of dish racks that are now also dedicated to this art form to allow the dye to penetrate the fabric and drip through without pooling on the bottom of the pan with my fabric in it.  It should sit for at least 3 hours...I'll watch it to determine when to take it out. 

I consulted primarily with 3 good tutes on these sites:

http://www.prochemical.com/directions/MX%20PDF/Snow%20Dyeing.pdf

http://bunks.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/snow-dyeing-and-grannyland/

http://www.harmonyhanddyes.com/InstructSnow.html