Author Archives: Teri Berry

Fabric Dyeing

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This has been another fun weekend, I always enjoy dyeing fabric and yesterday I did some more shibori exploration in preparation for a monthly craft group at the end of January. We will be playing with shibori techniques and as the only one who has practiced any shibori at all, I expect it will fall to me to “teach” everyone else. I feel like a bit of a fraud since I have only done it a handful of times before. These are the fruits of my efforts, they are all small samples but I am quite pleased with how they turned out.

Clamped with triangular shaped pieces of wood:

Clamped with square pieces of wood:

Twisted and wrapped around a ruler:

Pleated, twisted and bound with elastic bands:

I also did some rainbow dyeing on ponge silk:

Cotton muslin:

And cotton scrim:

First Quarter Challenge 2014

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The lovely ladies at Felting Fibre Studio have set another fab quarterly challenge, this time it is to interpret Jackson Pollock’s work into fibre. I confess I’m not a big fan of most abstract art but some of his more colourful pieces do intrigue me. Looking through images of his work, the following caught my attention the most:

I like the radial symmetry of this piece and think the white dotted lines might do well with some batik style dyeing.

I’m not so keen on the aesthetics of this piece but I like the concept of twisted ropes of felt and other fibres, this piece definitely lends itself towards interpretation in fibres… it reminds me of my attempts at knitting!

At the time the challenge was set I was working on some batik pieces and this seemed like an obvious place to start, effectively throwing the liquid wax at the cloth a la Pollock style and then dyeing and painting over the top of that. This is the first step towards that piece…

I am also hatching another idea I had was sparked by Annie’s birds at Rosiepink, she uses acrylic paint on felt after sketching with machine embroidery. More on that another time.