It was so long since I had seen all of the Free Motions that I forgot to take pictures of our work day. Nina has been AWOL for a long time, taking workshops, battling the flu and traveling. We spent quite a lot of time gabbing instead of working, I’m afraid. We also spent quite a lot of time standing around talking while Shelley made thermofax screens, too. Then, of course we spent time eating. All in all, not our most focused day, but we actually did do some dyeing!
I do have a few pictures of some of my more successful experiments with shibori. I ended up doing mostly pole wrapping techniques and trying to mimic those techniques through folding. For pole wrapping, I use a large PVC pipe cut into two. The diameter is about 6-8 inches. The fabric is wrapped flat around the pole, the fabric is then wrapped with twine along it’s length and then it’s scrunched or compressed along the pipe. Thsi creates small pleats that you apply the dye to. Dharma Trading (one of my favorite places for supplies) Has some good pictures of the technique. I have to point out that I am WAY too lazy to really do much shibori. If you look at the Japanese techniques, they are, for the most part, meticulous and time consuming. If you haven’t guessed by now, these are not my strong points. I am more of a serendipidous dyer. It is way more fun for me this way and I get great results at times, but does mean that I can rarely reproduce what I have made in the past. Here’s some pictures of my haphazard experiments:
I really liked the way this pole wrapping turned out. It was a piece of truly ugly velvet that I used up old dye on. Most of it didn’t take. You can see it’s loveliness on the left of the photo. I used thickened dye and dry fabric because I wanted a crisper line. Dye tends to end up blurrier when the fabric is wet or the dye is thin. Anyway, I got a truly beautiful result, but the velvet sucked up all of the dye and it never made it down to the lower layers of the wrapping. I will reverse the wrapping and do the other half the same way. I really like the lines I got. Click on photo for bigger image:
dry velvet pole wrap shibori
I had some other pole wrapped pieces, but they were really crap. The dye color was too light and was runny. It didn’t really give me any distinctive line, not worth posting.
When my poles were all used up, I tried a few experiments in trying to get the shibori look from folding fabric, rather than pole wrapping. They don’t really mimic shibori all that much, but they aren’t a bad result. The first one here uses thickened dye (thickened with print paste) on wet velvet. I got a surprisingly crisp line:
Pleated wet velvet with thickened dye
This one was less thrilling. The cotton was wet and the dye wasn’t thickened quite so much. The dye spread much more than it did on the velvet. Still, not a terrible result:
previously dyed wet cotton redyed with thickened dye
I tried to do some pleating and wrapping techniques with discharge paste, but it didn’t really discharge much. I meant to do some fancy stitch resist techniques, but didn’t have time to get them done before the work group.
