Ice Dye Adventures: Jackson Tee and Tea Towels

 Woop, woop! Another Jackson Tee in a fun fabric!

The fabric is a bamboo (maybe?) french terry (same substrate as the blue fabric I used for Tim's Jackson). Tim got it for me in Japan, but I wasn't in love with the color for me- it was a light sea green that washed me out.

So I thought it would be a good opportunity to try out some of the ice dyeing techniques everyone's been doing on ye olde interwebs (see Heather, Caramiya, Nancy and many others!).

Before dyeing my french terry I decided to test run the method and my colors. I bought some cotton tea towels, dye and mordant from Dharma Trading Co. and had a go! For colors I opted for blues and greens: better blue green, cayman isle green, and teal blue. 

I won't get into detail on how I did my ice dyeing; there are so many great tutorials out there (see Dharma Trading Co., Seamwork, Elizabeth Made This, Closet Core Patterns, and so on.). The only thing I did differently was to use snow from my yard rather than a bag of ice. Snow was plentiful at the time!

I loved how my tea towels turned out... marbleized and colorful and fun!

However, the french terry definitely didn't turn out the same as my towels! 

I don't know if it's the substrate/fabric content, the size of the piece of fabric I was dyeing (the 2 meter x 60" piece was a little squished up on my rack), or the fact that the snow was icier (we had a warm spell and then a re-freeze between when I dyed the tea towels vs. the french terry), but the dye was a bit spotty, the lines less distinct, and the color a bit less vibrant (almost muddy!). 

It's still pretty, though, so I forged ahead with my project!

I went for a long sleeved Helen's Closet Jackson Tee. Same as my last tees, I went with a size 20 with the View A length and the View C/D sleeves.

I have a weird phobia of cuffs, though, so I just lengthened the sleeves by 2.5 inches and hemmed them by 1 inch.

It turned out so cute! 

I'll definitely plan on some more ice dyeing at some point. Maybe when it's a bit warmer out and I can try it outside. I'm interested in trying a single color; I'm fascinated how some of the dye "split" into their component colors during the ice dyeing process!