6 Ice Dye Folding Techniques and the Patterns They Create

The way you fold your fabric before applying ice and dye determines the entire pattern of the finished piece. I've been ice dyeing professionally since 2021, and these six ice dye folding techniques are the ones I come back to over and over in my York, PA studio. Some are beginner-friendly, some take practice to get right, and all of them produce dramatically different results.

One thing to understand before we get into the techniques: ice dye folding is not the same as traditional tie dye folding. In traditional tie dye, you're controlling where liquid dye reaches the fabric through rubber bands, ties, and tight folds. In ice dye, you're creating a surface for the ice to melt across. The fold determines the fabric's topography (peaks, valleys, folds, crevices) and the melting ice navigates that terrain, carrying dye particles wherever gravity and fabric texture take them. The results are always more organic and unpredictable than traditional tie dye, which is what gives ice dye its watercolor quality.

For all of these techniques, start with a blank that has been soaked in soda ash solution for 20-30 minutes and wrung out to damp (not dripping). If you need the full process, our beginner's guide to ice dye covers everything from soda ash prep to final rinse.

1. The Crumple (Scrunch)

Difficulty: Beginner

This is the technique I recommend for every single person trying ice dye for the first time, and it's the one I still use for the majority of pieces in my own production. The crumple is forgiving, fast, and consistently produces beautiful results.

How to Do It

1. Take your soda-ash-soaked, wrung-out blank and gather it loosely in your hands.
2. Crumple and scrunch the fabric into a rough ball shape. Don't overthink it. The randomness is the point.
3. Place the crumpled fabric on your wire rack over a catch bin.
4. Gently compress it so it holds its shape but isn't packed tightly. You want folds and crevices, not a dense wad.

What the Pattern Looks Like

The crumple creates organic, flowing lines of color with plenty of white space in the deep folds where ice melt doesn't penetrate fully. The pattern looks like abstract watercolor: no geometric shapes, no symmetry, just natural-looking rivers and pools of color. Every crumple is different because the random folds are never the same twice.

Why Ice Changes This Pattern

In traditional tie dye with liquid, a crumpled shirt absorbs dye somewhat uniformly through the scrunched fabric. With ice, the dye only enters from the top where the ice is melting and travels downward through gravity and capillary action. The high points and outer folds get the most concentrated color. The inner crevices and bottom layers stay lighter or white. This creates much more contrast and depth than a liquid dye crumple ever could.

2. The Flat Lay

Difficulty: Beginner

The flat lay is the opposite approach from the crumple. Instead of compressing the fabric, you spread it out. This gives the ice maximum surface area to melt across, producing broad, sweeping washes of color.

How to Do It

1. Lay your blank relatively flat on the wire rack. You can let it drape naturally over the edges or fold it gently so it fits.
2. Create gentle ripples and soft folds in the fabric, not pressed flat like ironing, but not scrunched either. Think of how a bedsheet looks when you toss it loosely on a bed.
3. The fabric should be a single layer or two layers at most in any spot.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Broad, painterly color washes with soft transitions. Less white space than the crumple because the ice has more direct contact with the fabric. Colors blend smoothly across the surface, creating something that looks more like a watercolor painting than a tie dye shirt. If you use a single dye color, the pigment-splitting effect is especially visible in a flat lay because the separated pigments have room to spread.

Why Ice Changes This Pattern

The flat lay highlights what Procion MX dye does when it has room to move. The ice melts across the fabric surface rather than trying to penetrate deep folds, so you see the full range of color splitting. A single dye like Boysenberry will clearly separate into its plum, rose, and lavender components across the width of the fabric. This technique makes the chemistry visible in a way that tighter folds can obscure.

3. The Spiral

Difficulty: Intermediate

The classic spiral fold adapted for ice dye. The technique is the same as traditional tie dye (pinch, twist, and flatten) but the results look completely different because the ice creates soft, feathered color transitions instead of the hard-edged spiral sections you get with liquid dye.

How to Do It

1. Lay your blank flat on your work surface.
2. Pinch the fabric at the point you want to be the center of the spiral. The center of the chest is standard, but you can offset it for a different look.
3. Twist the fabric around that center point, keeping it flat as you go. Use your other hand to tuck the edges inward as they wrap around.
4. You should end up with a flat, round disc of fabric, like a cinnamon roll. Secure it with rubber bands in a cross pattern (2-3 bands) to hold the shape.
5. Place the disc on your wire rack.

What the Pattern Looks Like

A soft, swirling pattern that radiates from the center point. Unlike the hard-line wedge sections in traditional tie dye spirals, ice dye spirals have feathered, bleeding edges where colors drift into each other. It looks more like a galaxy or a nebula than the pizza-slice spiral most people associate with tie dye. If you apply different dye colors in different sections of the spiral (like wedges of a pie), you'll get distinct color zones with soft transitions between them.

4. The Accordion Fold

Difficulty: Intermediate

The accordion fold creates striped or banded patterns. The width and consistency of your folds determine the width and regularity of the bands. This is one of the more controllable techniques, and you can get fairly predictable results once you've practiced it a few times.

How to Do It

1. Lay your blank flat on your work surface.
2. Starting from one end (either the hem or one side), fold the fabric back and forth in even accordion pleats. Think of folding a paper fan. Each fold should be about 1-2 inches wide. Wider folds create wider color bands, narrower folds create thinner, more detailed stripes.
3. Once the entire garment is folded into a long, pleated strip, you can leave it as-is for horizontal stripes, or fold the strip in half or thirds for a more compact shape.
4. Place on your wire rack.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Striped color bands running across the garment. The ice creates soft, feathered edges on each band rather than hard lines. Where two colors meet at fold boundaries, you get a gentle gradient blend. The regularity of the stripes depends on how even your accordion folds are. Perfectly even folds produce more uniform bands, while uneven folds create organic variation. I personally prefer slightly uneven folds because perfect symmetry doesn't suit the organic nature of ice dye.

5. The Bullseye

Difficulty: Advanced

The bullseye creates concentric rings of color radiating from a central point. It requires more setup than the other techniques and a specific approach to dye placement.

How to Do It

1. Lay your blank flat on your work surface.
2. Pinch the center of the fabric and lift it straight up so the garment hangs down like a cone or a jellyfish.
3. Smooth the hanging fabric so it drapes evenly without twisting.
4. Starting from the top (the pinch point), wrap rubber bands at intervals down the length of the cone, every 1-2 inches. These bands create the ring boundaries.
5. Lay the banded cone on its side on your wire rack.
6. Apply different dye colors between each rubber band section for distinct colored rings, or use a single color for a monochromatic bullseye with varying saturation.

What the Pattern Looks Like

Concentric circles of color when you unfold the piece, with the center at whatever point you pinched. The ice dye version has softer edges than traditional tie dye bullseyes. The rings bleed and feather into each other, and the color splitting adds depth within each ring. It takes practice to get the ring spacing even and the dye placement precise, which is why I rate this one advanced.

6. The Bundle (Ice Dye Shibori)

Difficulty: Advanced

This technique borrows from Japanese shibori dyeing traditions and creates concentrated bursts of pattern. Instead of folding the entire garment, you create tight bundles at specific points using rubber bands or string.

How to Do It

1. Lay your blank flat.
2. Choose several points on the fabric. 3 to 6 spots work well. At each point, pinch a small section of fabric (about the size of a golf ball or tennis ball) and wrap it tightly with a rubber band at the base, creating a small pouch or mushroom shape.
3. The tightly bound sections will resist dye penetration, creating white or light-colored circles on the finished piece.
4. Scrunch or loosely fold the rest of the fabric between the bound sections.
5. Place on your wire rack and apply dye over the ice as usual.

What the Pattern Looks Like

You get circular resist patterns (white or lightly dyed circles) surrounded by fully dyed areas. The size of each circle depends on how much fabric you gathered into each bundle. The surrounding dyed areas take on the organic ice dye watercolor effect, so you end up with geometric circles floating in abstract color. It's a beautiful contrast between controlled shapes and uncontrolled dye flow.

Which Technique Should You Start With?

Start with the crumple. I say this to everyone and I mean it. The crumple gives you the best introduction to how ice dye behaves — how the melt carries color, how white space develops in the folds, how pigment splitting shows up on fabric. Once you understand those fundamentals, the other techniques make more intuitive sense.

After the crumple, try the flat lay. It's almost as easy but produces a very different aesthetic, which teaches you how fabric manipulation changes results even when you use the same dye and the same process.

Save the bullseye and bundle for after you've done at least 5-10 pieces. They require precision in both folding and dye placement, and if you're still figuring out how much dye to use or how the ice melt behaves, the extra complexity just adds frustration.

Try These Techniques Yourself

If you want to experiment with these folding techniques, our DIY Ice Dye Boxes include Procion MX dye, soda ash, a premium blank, and instructions to get you started. The crumple and flat lay work especially well as first projects. Pair the box with our guide on the best ice dye color combinations to choose a palette that will make your pattern really pop.

Not into DIY? Browse our ready-to-ship ice dye collection to see these techniques in action on finished pieces. Every garment is hand-dyed by me in my studio using the same methods from this guide, and each one is one-of-a-kind. The fold, the ice melt, and the dye all come together differently every single time.