my shibori happy place

It’s been a long time since I’ve taken time to play with Shibori dye techniques. I had a deadline last month that I knew I wanted to create some cloth for. I had almost forgotten how much fun it is to manipulate and play with pattern and cloth.

A good part of a day was spent folding, clamping, sewing, wrapping, twisting, and scrunching cloth then mixing up a couple of dye baths. I didn’t have a bucket close at hand that was deep enough for the pole I wrapped – so experimentation was in order.

The dye sits for several hours and I swish it or pour it up over the wrap every once in a while then it’s time to rinse and unwrap. The kidlets were in the house and probably thought I was a little crazy with the way I kept jumping up and down and squealing as I opened up each piece. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE it’s like magic!!!

I suppose with great care and after years of working with the technique you can control your pattern outcome. I love to see what happens with just playing around.

Poker chips were clamped between layers of folded cloth. I love circles. Can you tell?

This is the piece that wasn’t submerged in the dye bath the whole time and it’s kind of cool how I got a gradation from grey to darker black. I might try to do that on purpose one of these days.

This bit is close to something we are more familiar with in american tie-dye. I love the spiderweb of radiating lines.

This was one of my favorite pieces out of the batch. You’ll see more of it soon. Can you just see me doing the happy happy happy shibori dance?

If you want to read a little more about the Japanese art of Shibori you can do that
HERE