Category Archives: shibori

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:

More adventures in shibori

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I also made another piece using stitching and gathering to provide a resist against the dye. This time I used a sewing machine to stitch parallel lines before tightly gathering the fabric. As with other piece, when I use this method again I will hand stitch, removing the machine stitching from gathered material was a real pain.

This piece was dyed at the same time as the “circles” shibori, again I removed the stitching while it was still wet. This is the result:

As you can see my stitching was less straight towards the bottom but I think the effect is still lovely.

This piece also became a book cover, first I stitched a couple of pleats into the fabric to add extra texture to the final fabric.

Then I laid out white merino top along the pale purple lines to maintain the contrast.

Before laying out 2 layers of merino top.

Here it is after felting, with the pleats giving added texture.

And the final product – an A4 book cover: