Experimenting dyeing fabrics using dye, sand and rocks

This is a really random experimentation with dyeing. As I am looking at the theme of Mars within Data I am particularly interested in Mars’s rocky terrain, with sand and dust. I was thinking of different practical ideas, where I could somehow incorporate sand and rocks. So I came up with the idea of loosely crumple dyeing with sand and rocks on top. I was interested to see if where the rocks and sand were on the fabric whether the fabric below would not dye or create an interesting shape. This is how the practical went ….

First of all I gathered all everything I was going to need for this practical, pictured and labelled below.

I started by dampening my large piece of fabric under the tap. Dampening your fabric before adding the dye allows for better dye saturation.

I then loosely crumpled it so it would fit in the container.

Next I got my jar of sand and scattered some on top of my fabric.

I then placed my rocks on top of the fabric.

This is a close up picture of the sand and rocks on the fabric before I added the fabric.

Now that I was nearly ready to start dyeing my fabric, I put 4 different coloured powdered dyes into 4 separate plastic cups, I then filled each cup about half way with water.

I carefully poured a bit of each dye onto the fabric so that the fabric was completely covered in dye.

I then left for about a day to soak and fully dry. Before throughly rinsing the fabric to remove and was away the sand.

Once it had been rinsed it looked like this, I left it to dry on some kitchen roll.

This is how it looked now that it was dry, it was quite creased from being crumpled up, so I ironed it.

Most of the large creases had disappeared, although it still seems to have a lot of small creases still.

I am quite happy with the final result from this unusual dyeing process. However, I don’t think that the sand and rocks did anything to change how it looks as I think some of the areas that have not been dyed has been due to the fabric being crumpled up.

I am still very happy that I undertook this experimentation, when I googled about using sand and rocks in the dyeing process I found absolutely nothing and this made me so much more interested in trying this.

I really like the look of the final result and I may potentially consider using this in my final piece.