Friday, July 15, 2011

Shibori

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to do some Shibori. If you are unfamiliar with the word, it is a Japanese term for the dye-resist technique of binding, clamping, or gathering fabric so that the dye cannot reach certain parts. The results are very interesting and often unpredictable. The traditional way of doing it is with Indigo dye, a complicated and messy process, but I have used MX reactive dyes in an Indigo color. Here are just a few of the samples that I've done over the past few days, starting with the easiest.

This was a piece of fabric that was folded accordion style then tied loosely with thread to keep the stacked shape.


This piece was folded in the same accordion pleat style but bound tightly with thread to form a tight roll. See how the dye could not penetrate the center and left many more white spaces.


These next two pieces were made by sewing a 45" tube of fabric to fit a PVC pipe 4" in diameter. I scrunched the fabric as tightly as I could to compress it toward the bottom of the pole.
After the fabric is prepped, it is submerged in the dye for a few hours, then taken out, unfolded or unscrunched, rinsed and washed.

Please come back tomorrow to see some stitched Shibori with some fascinating designs.

5 comments:

Sherryl said...

Great pieces Norma.

my croft said...

oh my gosh. breathtaking, and that's just the fabric. I can hardly wait to see what you do with it.

Anonymous said...

I really like the bottom 2 pictures with the scrunched shibori. I just finished doing some stitched shibori, but have never tried the scrunched method. Could be fun and a bit less tedious than the stitching method. Waiting to see what you do with the pieces!!

Elaine Quehl said...

Love your shibori Norma. I am particularly fond of pole-wrapped pieces, and love yours. I just made a striped dahlia using some of my pole wrapped shibori. You can see it on my blog (http://elainequehl.blogspot.com)
Elaine

Anonymous said...

in the last two pictures the pattern in the fabric looks like a school of fishies. so beautiful!