Multiple Mandala Ice Dye

I love mandala shirts! No matter how many I make, I think they all turn out unique. For this shirt I purposely wanted to try to tie all the mandalas as randomly as possible. Here is a link to the YouTube video for this shirt if you would like to follow along:

If you’ve watched the video, you know how I prep my shirts and how the shirt was folded and tied - so, let’s move on to the dyeing part. I wanted to ice dye this shirt in the muck. That means that I allow the shirt to process in the runoff from the melted ice and dye. I started by putting the shirt inside a plastic container that was about the same size as the shirt. I wanted to use a container that wasn’t too large because I wanted the shirt to sit in a lot of muck without having to add a lot of ice.

I only used two dye colors - ice blue from Prochemical and Dye and midnight blue from Grateful Dyes. I think that the purple color splits came from the midnight blue. I chose to put the dye over the top of the ice this time instead of directly on the shirt. Either way is perfectly acceptable - I was looking for a softer look for this shirt so I put the dye on top of the ice.

I left the container in a warm room and didn’t disturb it or touch it for 48 hours to allow it to process. I am pretty pleased with the final shirt. I like the light and dark color variations - I think they make the mandalas really stand out!