Snow Dyeing 2026

It’s been so long since I snow dyed, but with all of the snow that we had recently, I just had to do it again.

I have a formula for how much dye I need for ice dyeing, so for the first shirts I used that. If you would like that formula, check out this video that explains how to use the calculator I created.

The link for the calculator is under the video. First you need to weigh what you are dyeing. The item needs to be dry. To get a more accurate weight, I always weigh in grams, but you can put the weight in ounces. The video walks you through what you need to do to get an amount for that item. However, this is just a guideline. You might want to use more or less dye.

These are Dave’s shirts. This was a heavy tshirt weighing in at 208 grams which I used 3.5 teaspoons of dye. This is Celadon. When I created my Icy Delights class back in 2016 and dyed 45 different colors for students to see how the colors break out, my Celadon piece was awful. I’m not sure what happened. I might not have stirred the dye. Anyway, my last shirt I ice dyed I used this color and loved it so I snow dyed Dave’s.

Next up is a shirt of his that was 146 grams, and I used 2.5 teaspoons of Wedgewood Blue dye.

I really loved these but I found that the wash out took me so long that in the next shirts and jackets I cut the dye in half. This is one of my jackets. It’s real lightweight coming in at 241 grams. Normally I’d use 4 teaspoons of dye but decided to cut it in half and only used 2. I also only batched it for 5 hours. Had I let it batch longer, the blue would have come out darker. But I still was happy with this jacket and look forward to warmer weather to wear it. This Blue Violet dye was one that my friend Dawn had given me several years ago and she’s had since the 90s. So even old dyes will work. I wrote several posts on the dyes she gave me. Here is the first in the series.

Dave loved this jacket so much that he wanted me to dye him a shirt with Blue Violet. I can’t remember if I cut the dye in half, but I did let it batch a bit more, and look at the blue! That was amazing.

I had this heavy jacket I had bought several years ago for dyeing, and decided it too needed to be snow dyed with Blue Violet. It weighed in at 620 grams. Instead of the 10 1/3 teaspoons of dye, I only used 5. I’m happy with the results, although a bit more dye would have been nice.

Then Dave found a long sleeve shirt which I used 3 teaspoons of Blue Violet on it. He’s worn it several times already!

There were two other shirts that I snow dyed, but I’ll wait to another post to talk about them. It was fun, but it was cold. My dye studio is in the garage. Once I finished adding the dye to the snow, I brought the containers into the laundry room for them to batch. The advantage of ice dyeing is you can do it any time and in warm weather. I can leave the containers out in the garage to batch so no bringing the mess indoors.

I’ve been thinking about why I had so much dye to wash out compared to when I ice dyed. Well, when I use ice I always batch for 24 hours which allows the dye to stay in the fabric with less washout. I was impatient with these and didn’t want to wait. Makes sense. Maybe next time it snows I’ll give it the 24-hour batch, but that said, I still liked how they turned out.

Not sure about you, but I’m ready for Spring. I’m off to sew some hearts! Hope you are staying warm.