Shibori

Today I show you some of the fabrics I dyed while I attended the Shibori Symposium in Minneapolis last month. All of these pieces are arashi shibori, each one has its own twist to it.

This piece was made by using a stitching tube of fabric. The stitching line was about 3"away from the edge of the fabric. After the fabric was pushed this down over a 4" pole these 'flaps' were dyed solidly while the other part of the fabric got the shibori pattern as it was crunched down.

The purple fabric also started out as a stitched tube. In this case the tube was much larger than the pole (1,5") required. This extra fabric was pleated while the tube around the pole was wrapped with cotton thread. The pleats got less dye than the other parts of the fabric creating this leave type of shapes on the final piece.

Instead of a pole you can also do arashi shibori over a thick rope. For this piece I used a rope about 0,5"-0,75" thick. The rope has its own pattern contrary to a pvc pipe and this shows in the final result. The dry fabric was wrapped diagonally over the rope with a cotton thread, pushed down and tied at the edges.

This fabric is the result of multiple layers of shibori. It started as a stitched tube pushed down over a 4" pvc tube. This was dyed blue. As you can see the stripes run horizontally. Before I continued with the second dye bath I first removed the stitching which had formed the tube. The second layer was created by first folding the fabric. The left part was closest to the pvc tube. You can see that the color there is lighter than at the right side. This time I wrapped the fabric diagonally across the 4" pole using a cotton thread and pushed it down. In this sample the second dye bath was green. By using 2 colors of dye it is easier to see how the fabric was created.

More pictures of different variations will come later.