A new addiction, aka "I'm a glutton!

Jeez.... just when I think I have tried everything, something comes along to lure me into a new addiction! No, I'm not on drugs... unless you want to consider dyes a mind-altering substance. Now that I think of it, maybe they are! I don't snort 'em, or smoke 'em, or swallow them, but I do love to apply them all over fabric. For years, I have enjoyed tie-dye, but that was just a gateway drug to ice-cube... that's right! ICE-CUBE parfait dyeing! I happened to pick up a copy of the June/July issue of Quilting Arts magazine... put it aside for a few days, then browsed through it one day while I was eating my lunch. The article that grabbed me was 'dye your own iced parfait' by Carol Ludington. Now, I have done my own version of dyeing that involved freezing my scrunched fabric or garment in a small container, then pouring liquid dyes over and letting it batch for hours... nice alternative to regular low water immersion dyeing. But this method uses ice cubes and dye powders direct from the jar, in layers with each layer covered with ice cubes and sprinkled with dyes. I had to try it!

I chose Golden Yellow, Bronze, Deep Orange, Scarlet, Olive Drab and Lapis for my color pallet. Fortunately, I have a nice tall covered plastic container, and tore up some muslin to create six fat quarters, then I dove in. This morning, having batched the bunch overnight, I rinsed and laundered them. As I pulled each piece from the batching bucket, all I could think of was "OMG... they look like clean-up rags!". And at that point, they did. However, once they had been rinsed, laundered, dried and pressed, it was a whole different story! See what you think:

I applied different combinations of the above colors to each piece, and they were laid one on top of another, so there was some seepage through the layers as the ice cubes melted. I am thinking I want to try stretching one over canvas stretcher bars, or over a pre-stretched canvas, to see how they would look mounted. There is way too much complexity to try stitching, so maybe I'll just let the parfaits speak for themselves. Needless to say, this is not the last you'll see here about iced parfaits! I'm hooked...