Once you’ve ice dyed enough you’ll start to notice trends with certain colors. Turquoise in particular is really hard to get a nice, bold color using this technique. Most of it washes out.
Fortunately this is a really easy fix!
All you need is some additional soda ash!
Just go through the normal ice dye procedure as normal: soak the fabric, layer the ice on top, and sprinkle the dye over the ice. Then all you need to do is sprinkle some more soda ash on top of the dye and ice and let it do its thing! It really is just that simple.
Check out these two pieces of fabric: the one on the left was dyed with the additional soda ash and the one on the right was dyed normally.
Look at how much darker it turned out!
So if you want more turquoise color to come through in your ice dye, throw some extra soda ash on top!
Do you think this works for other colors that have turquoise as a component color?
Great blog btw! Really informative.
I did a follow up using extra soda ash with other colors here: http://mythicseam.com/should-you-always-add-extra-soda-ash-when-ice-dyeing/
I haven’t actually tested a mix of colors containing turquoise, but my thought is that because turquoise is the slowest to react there’s a good chance that the other colors in the mix would react faster and darker than turquoise, preventing the turquoise from actually showing on the fabric.
Just found you and I have to say that your blog is very informative. I’m having problems with my fabrics not coming out as textured as I would like them. Some of them are very muddy. A friend of mine suggested that I fold my fabrics, put them on my rack, (everything is dry right now) sprinkle soda ash on them, place ice and then dye powder. Batch for 24 hours. Sometimes I put the dye down before the ice, it seems to make no difference. Maybe it’s the fabric I’m dying. Right now cotton knit. Silk is pretty but… Read more »
I soak the fabric in a soda ash solution before dyeing and generally don’t add any additional soda ash powder on top of the ice. Generally “muddy” is a result of too many colors, whether you are adding a lot of different dyes yourself or using a premade dye mixture that contains many different pigments. Without actually seeing your finished results I’m unfortunately not going to be able to help much, but if you would like to send a picture to mythicseam@gmail.com I can see if I have any additional suggestions.
I have changed my approach. I soaked my fabric in the soda ash solution. After about 30 minutes or more, I took out the fabric and wringed (rung?) it out really, really well. Put ice on the fabric which is placed on a rack. Then I put the dye on. I batch it for at least 24 hours. The last two batches turned out really well. So, I think that my mistake was not wringing out the fabric well enough. Thank you so much for your attention!