My first great crafting obsession was crochet. I collected tons of patterns from the internet and started building up pretty good yarn stash. I constantly crocheted cloches – every gift-giving holiday was an excuse for foisting my handmade hats on loved ones.

Somewhere, somehow that crochet habit evolved to knitting. It’s much more of a time investment, more tools, more techniques to master. More polished results. And the yarn hoard exploded.

Oh, there was also jewelry-making phase followed by a candle-making chapter. Which required the purchase of a metric ton of new crafty doo-dads, what-nots, and assorted paraphernalia.

Then I shifted to sewing. Maybe because I could produce more things faster? Maybe because it’s about mastering new skills? Also: fabric hoarding is like, the heroin of crafting related addictions.

At the moment, though, I am all about the ice dye.

 

There is just something about the mystery of the color-breaking.

It’s like Christmas morning, you know you are going to get something…but you don’t know what it will be until you open it.

Each new crafty project lends suspense: “Can I actually make this work? Will it become a thing?” And that’s exciting, right? Until you hit a certain level of experience, that is. Once you reach a certain mastery of a technique, the suspense fades. You know you can make a thing. More than that, you can even predict how to best tweak a pattern or create your own variation. Then you have to find a new mystery, a new technique. A new obsession.

Or is that just me?

Ice dying keeps me guessing – in the good way. The color bursts by it’s own rules. It blends and blurs depending on the make-up of the dye, the size of the cubes, the amount of cubes, the chemistry of the fiber additives. Even the the ambient room temperature as the ice melts factors in to the mix. So while the technique is easy to set-up for some gorgeous results, you just don’t know what flavor of gorgeous is going to remain until the excess dye is washed out.

It’s a hardcore habit now. I mean, I am writing this post to distract myself from the dye dealer. Yeah, that’s right. Ice dying is so addictive, I’ve been making multiple supply purchases each week for the last month or so.

You want some of that mystery?

I’ll break it down in new post soon. I’ll keep you in a little suspense until then.

Cheers – and happy crafting!