A Day of Shibori Dyeing

Two mornings this week I got up at dawn (which is pretty late this time of year but still...).  There were just enough clouds to make the sunrise really pretty both days.  The second day I grabbed the camera and hurried down to our beach trying to catch the first few rays!

 Thursday I headed to my friend Dianne's house with a car packed full of dyes, clamps and clothespins as she wanted to learn to do some shibori.  I just grabbed a few of my already dyed fabrics that I had brought down here.  They were some of the lighter colors that were just boring as they were.  I bring down fabrics that are small chunks for the most part figuring on doing some random scrappy quilts.  I tend to dye larger pieces of yardage these days.  This piece was an exception in that it was a large piece of fabric dyed sun yellow originally.  This was sewn into a double tube and put on a 5 inch wide piece of pvc pipe and then pushed down with rubber bands at the top and bottom.  It was dyed in a brown/black dye bath.  I used a bit too much dye in these dye baths but you do get a gradation effect.

This is one of my favorite techniques for shibori and is the most labor intensive.  You basically put folds in the fabric and then do a running stitch and pull tight.  You can make any design  you want.  Again a little too much dye so not enough definition.  It was again brown/black over a pale yellow.

This was another yellow overdyed piece.  It was dyed with a brown/scarlet mix and was again sewn into a tube and put on a 5 inch pvc pipe.

 This was a fat quarter from one of my overdyeing experiments.  It was a plain leaf green which I inadvertently overdyed with leaf green!  This was twisted on the diagonal on a 5 inch pvc pipe with rubber bands at either end.

This is the same as above only using a much smaller pvc pipe -- probably only an inch in diameter.

This was another piece that was sewn into a tube and pushed down a 5 inch pipe.  It is a half yard piece and was yellow and obviously from the way it took color, it was variegated.  It is very difficult to see the variegation in a yellow but you can see it when overdyed as the more intensely yellow dyed will not take as much of the blue (in this case).

 This was a clamped piece where I used two mirrors and clamps (which kept falling off as the mirrors were too slippery).  This was accordion folded in one direction and then again in the opposite direction.

This is again the mirrors clamped on a fat quarter that was pink.  I presoaked the pink so it resisted the dye a bit more.  I overdyed with blue/violet.

All of these pieces were immersion dyed.  I used about 3 gal of water, 2 cups of salt per container and about 4 tsps of dye.  I added 5 tbsps of soda ash after fifteen minutes and then let it sit for another hour.  To get better penetration, it helps to move the stuff around during the first half hour.

No Power Dyeing Today!

For years, a session dyeing generally meant I would have 50 yards of new fabric by the end of the day and would dye like this for about a week before I just gave up and ironed the piles of fabric I had created! Speed was of the essence.

Since spending so much time marbling lately, my approach to dyeing has modified a bit as well. I am thinking more about what I am doing, trying some new things and just working on yardage until I get what I would like at which point I call it the end. So now there are only a few pieces from each day and I will work on those until I am happy rather than put them in the ugly basket -- although marbling might be just the thing to add eventually!

This was a piece that I folded and put to alligator clips on. All these pieces were immersion dyed in ProChem's Intense Blue. I had about 500 gms of fabric and I used about two level tbsps of the dye and two cuts of salt per the 3 gallons of water. I used about 1 1/2 cups of soda ash. All the pieces here went into the same dye bath.
This was the plain white fabric as above but with the clips with the circles at the end from the dollar store. These previous two I presoaked in water so that they would resist the dye a bit more.


This was an overdye of the intense blue over basically a 3% turquoise/3% sun yellow that I did using lwi. I loosely wrapped this yard over a rolled up piece of needlepoint canvas thinking that the dye would penetrate all layers better which it did. I was surprised that I didn't get any markings from the needlepoint canvas. It is a pretty color. I didn't presoak this one but did presoak the next one.

This was also a piece of the sun yellow/turquoise which I overdyed with the intense blue and used the clips again after accordion folding. Don't think I will do any more layers here but you never know!

This was one of the pieces from the previous dye session that I said I would overdye. It was originally the yucky green/gold and I had folded it and rubber banded it and dyed in the intense blue/navy mixture. Those are the darker lines. This time I wound it loosely over a 5 inch pvc pipe. I didn't presoak this one as I wanted more of the dye to go over the yucky part that didn't dye with the last bath. I will probably do no more on this one, however I reserve the right.....

Today the dye pots will have to remain silent as I MUST clean my bedroom so I can enjoy my new birthday tv!

Dyeing Etc., Etc., Etc.......

Dyeing back in session! I had some hideous yellows that needed to be overdyed as well as some of the greens from the turquoise/yellow day. So I gathered together some miscellaneous stuff, did some miscellaneous wrapping and other mechanical resists (clothespins, rubber bands and string). I also added in some upholstery fabric that I had which I figured might dye well as it was part rayon and part cotton and natural colored -- small pieces but would make nice placemats. After I put the resists on, I soaked all the fabrics in warm water long enough so that it would get all the way through. This keeps the inside whiter (or its original color) as the water acts as a resist as well.


I mixed together about a tbsp of deep navy (ProChem 414) and Intense Blue (ProChem 406, I believe). We shall see what happens! I didn't weigh, I barely even measured the dyes but did add a couple of cups of salt into the solution figuring I had about a pound of fabric. I will add in about 1 1/2 cups of soda ash soon as I think there is about 3 gallons of water in the pail. I haul the fabric out of the pail before adding and mixing in the soda ash though. I might try to dissolve it in some water before I do that. Then I will let everything sit for a couple of hours and then voila (I hope!!)


They are in the washer and the first reports are excellent!! The fabric that I purchased for aprons for my BIL dyes beautifully and from Joanns no less!! So (even though I said no more white fabric, just this once...) I will head over and get a bolt of it as it will be great for tote bags, etc. as it is about the hand of canvas -- whoopee! I love when I find new fabric that dyes well!

This is the long one with the rubber bands just holding it together on the fabric which was accordion folded. Very important to use accordion folds so that you get relatively even dyeing.
I am going to shibori this one again using a different pattern.


This was the one on the pole with the string around it as well. It literally looks like four different pieces as it was a whole yard that I folded in half and then wrapped.

This is the one that has the rectangular clothespins along each side of the accordion folds.

This was the the white canvas fabric that I bought from Joanns. It was accordion folded and then the round little clothespins from the Dollar Store were applied. This is definitely my favorite, but of course it was fabric from scratch.

My Pieces from the Shibori Days

This is a slide show of a lot of the pieces I did but will include some in the blog anyway! If you double click on it, it will take you to my Picasa albums and you can see the labels under each piece if you choose the slideshow option!

Well, as a follow up I thought I should post some of the pieces that I did with some explanation of how they got the way they were! Mine were far from the nicest examples done during the two days but I was running out of battery in the camera so I didn't get as many shots as I would have liked. Some of the ladies did some awesome stuff with their fabrics.

It has been hard to sleep as I keep thinking of what I want to do next to some of the pieces. Winning out is doing some monoprinting on top of the clamped pieces that have lots of white -- even though I like the pieces, I do have an aversion to any white left on my dyed pieces!!

Something I will be doing more of in the future is setting up an immersion bath (not low water immersion) and wrapping and clamping using a wide variety of techniques but the same dye baths. I like having a whole bunch of fabrics in the same palette but very different in texture and design. The tables are outside and the weather should be cooperating soon!

This is a traditionally stitched shibori piece. It was a one yard piece of cotton sateen. I ironed in fairly evenly spaced lines. I then formed a pleat on each ironed line and sewed through both layers of the pleat and then gathered it. You get a nice effect this way and can stitch it anywhere you want on your piece. This was dyed with ProChem's blue violet mix which is one of the few mixes I do buy occasionally. I also like their Basic Brown which is a mix.

This is just a closeup of the piece above.
This is a piece that I literally threw together at the last minute, wrapping a piece of cheaper fabric around a pole and then just throwing on some rubber bands to hold it somewhat. The colors used were mixing red, strong orange, a little golden yellow and some mixing blue (to darken it a bit).

This is made by sewing the fabric into a tube and then compressing it on a pole as described in an earlier post. This was the fuchsia and black mix.

This is one of my favorites and was made by diagonally putting on a pole and twisting down. It was first dyed in yellow and then without removing from the pole overdyed with a 3 primary mix (kind of a brown).


This is the first of two pieces (more on my Picasa site) made with the golden yellow and navy mix. It was scrunched in a stocking and thrown into the dye bath.

.This was just accordion folded and clamped randomly with some clamps.

This is the first of two that were on the same pole in the same bath. They were first dyed in a yellow bath and then overdyed with a intense blue/navy mix. Notice that the top one has far less color than the bottom one.

Day 2 - Shibori Dyeing

This was a visitor to our dyeing venue who had taken up residence on my gloves overnight. He had to climb up a table to do this!
You can see that the day turned out beautifully and the lawn was covered by our product by mid afternoon.

Well, it turned out to be a beautiful day and fairly warm so perfect for dyeing. We managed to go through another two complete iterations before some of us older folk were just too tired to proceed any further.

I took less risks with the colors I mixed today going with some tried and true mixes. I have moved so far away from mixing by volume measuring, it took some time to get the proportions right. I always measure by weight now in my dyeing as I like some predictability in colors (never guaranteed though).

There were definitely some lessons to be learned from the last two days which are as follows:

1. You can get totally different results using the same pole, fabric and dye pot depending upon where in the dye pot the particular fabric falls. I had three pieces of fabric wrapped on a pole and the top piece was very different than the bottom piece. Cause: not enough agitation of the dye bath!




2. Different fabrics act very differently when compressed. My pfd sateen resisted color far more than the Egyptian cotton in the same dye bath. Where I had clamps, it was actually white without dipping in water first.




3. Just using plain old clothespins or clamps right on some fabric that you have sloppily accordion pleated and then folded will yield some wonderful results.




4. Clamps on plexiglas in a group setting just don't work. Using rubber bands was easier on the clamps and a lot cheaper in the long run.




5. Going a little heavy on the dyes in the dye bath will increase the likelihood that you will get better overall patterning in your shibori especially when you are using a big piece of cloth wrapped around a skinny pole. It is better to go a little lighter on the concentrations when using big fat poles as it is more difficult to get the good compression.




6. You can shibori silk successfully if you compress well. We had many excellent examples from one of our dyers in the group who was willing to try anything.




7. You can use a Bernina sewing machine to sew through many layers of fabric and actually prevent the dye from migrating into the center of the sewn piece; i.e. , if you sew a square through all the layers of an accordion pleated piece of fabric, you will have nice resist marks for the stitching but will also have lightly dyed squares all over the piece of fabric.




8. Give a group of 10 creative women some color and fabric to play with, and you will have 20 new ideas by the end of two days and one heck of a lot of fun! We had some interesting experiences today and things that I learned!

The most favored colors were the navy blue and my blues mixes. I use the Procion MX Deep Navy which is one of the pure blues. I mixed up turquoise with the navy for one mix and mixed mixing blue, turquoise and intense blue for another. Also very well received were the two greens made with (1) intense blue and golden yellow and (2) navy blue and golden yellow. They yield nice earthy greens. My purple lovers loved the Pro Chem Blue/Violet and a purple made with their Deep Black and Fuchsia. I made a nice red with mixing red, strong orange, some golden yellow and a dash of mixing blue -- it was a deep earthy red. Everyone loved just the black mixtures as they would of course break down into their components and move at different speeds. Of course the yellows and turquoise do this as well.

Some things to remember:

1. You need to clamp and tie pretty tightly to get effective patterning.



2. Don't wrap your poles too tight or you won't be able to compress the fabric down.



3. If you want more patterning and more white areas, soak your fabric for about 10 minutes ahead of time in plain water. The water will act as somewhat of a resist (depending upon the colors you are using). Turquoise and the yellows seem to wander just about wherever they want, regardless of how tight you clamp. Use this to your advantage.



4. You can always discharge! Most of the time this is true; however, intense blue, golden yellow, fuchsia and turquoise don't discharge. Basic blue discharges to an ugly beige. (I use the ProChem color names -- one of my earlier blogs has a conversion for those who use Dharma dyes). Random dyeing like this is apt to give you some real "dye dogs" but they are opportunities for discharging, painting with paints, rubber stamping with paints and just plain overdyeing!!

These were Barb's from the second day. She had overdyed some of the fuchsias that she didn't like as well as one of the yellows.
These are two pieces that were created just with folding and clamping the fabrics. The top one is one of the blue mixes and the bottom is the navy and golden yellow mix.
This was the lawn where we were drying the fabrics before bundling them up to take home. Believe it or not, this is mostly my bunch from the second set of pots. Because Bev has well water, we decided to only rinse twice and then dry the fabric. This would ensure that no color leached between pieces (even though the Synthapol would more than likely have taken out the stain). The weather cooperated and pieces dried in probably a half an hour so while we were cleaning up, everything dried.

Day 1 - Shibori Dyeing

This is the view off into the Bristol Hills where we did our dyeing. It was just a beautiful venue for doing this activity and we thank Beverly for hostessing us!



This was the barn where we did a lot of the dyeing. It was a very sunny day at first and many in the group had to be very careful not to get too much exposure.

Well, it looked like it would be a nice day but it was a bit cool and we lost the sun after lunch so the challenge was to keep the dye pots warm enough so the dyes would react.

There were about 10 of us dyeing altogether. Our process was to first set up the dye pots with the warmed water and the salt needed for immersion dyeing. We used good deep buckets because we were doing a lot of poles. Everyone came really well prepared with sewn, clamped, twisted and wrapped fabric. We set up 6 different colors originally using sun yellow, golden yellow, strong orange, black, green and a brown of sorts. We had about 2 tbsps of dye in about 3 1/2 gallons of water with 2 cups of salt added. The salt weight should approximate the weight of the fabric you are dyeing. We took turns putting in our fabrics into the different baths, cycling through all of us so we would all get a chance to have some in any of the baths. We agitated the fibers and stacked the poles one inside of another so maximize our space. We agitated the fibers for about fifteen minutes and then added about a cup of soda ash to each and then agitated again for another fifteen minutes so that the dye wouldn't sit on the bottom. Altogether the fabrics stayed in the baths for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Everyone was anxious to see what they had so we unwrapped at the end, after doing enough rinsing to get the soda ash out.

Another technique that people enjoyed was painting the fabric with plain old dyes (no soda ash). We then let those pieces dry and then wrapped and clamped them and then dunked them into the second set of dyes we had created -- darker colors this time. You get wonderful color underneath that is a bit subtle as not a lot of the soda ash gets to the colors and they are diluted a bit by the heavy water concentration in the regular immersion.

After we unwrapped the second bunch, we gave out some Synthrapol and told everyone to rinse, rinse, rinse and then wash with the hottest possible water with the Synthrapol in it. Several of the members had front loaders, so we cautioned them to use very, very little of the Synthrapol. Tomorrow we start again.

This is a lot of the ladies laboring over the dye pots. We had to agitate quite a bit for the first half hour of each "session" so that the dyes would not just move to the bottom and get lopsided dyeing. They were working hard.


This is just one of the pots where you can see we stacked the poles inside of one another to maximize the amount of fabric we could fit into the pot. I still think we didn't put enough fabric in as the results were pretty dark!



Donna was putting another piece of her painted fabrics out on the line to dry. All of these fabrics had been dye painted without any soda ash. Again, they were pretty concentrated dyes.



Anne is very proud of her beautiful piece where she used tried and true tie dye techniques.


Marcia accordion folded this one and used clothespins to clamp along the side. I think it was dyed in our navy blue bath.



This was done by just sewing a folded up piece of fabric together on the sewing machine. It was just a simple sewing a line in the shape of a square through all the layers.



This was a piece that had been dyed once that Jeanne overdyed by just schrunching together and putting some string around it radiating out from the center. I think it was one of our made up colors over a golden yellow.


This was one of the traditional pole wrapped pieces.

This piece was another by Marcia and it was accordion folded and then tied together. It looked even better in person. I think this was one of the manufactured blacks.
This was made by taking those small pebble like things you can get at the dollar store for putting in vases and wrapping cloth over it and securing with a rubber band.
This was wrapped on a thick piece of rope and then dyed. I like this one a lot!

Arashi Shibori or Bust!

Well today was spent preparing for the two days of shibori dyeing at a friend's house. It took pretty much the whole day of wrapping and folding to do up about 10 yards worth of fabrics. To get the best patterning, I prefer to use the largest diameter pvc pipe I can find and use no more than half yard pieces per wrap. As I mentioned before, I use "fat halves" which are half yard pieces cut lengthwise giving you two 36" x 22" pieces. However, one of the nice things is that if you have nice deep containers for doing the dyeing, you can actually fit two or three pieces of fabric on one pole by squeezing down nice and tight. The smaller the diameter of the pole, the higher up the fabric will squeeze down to on the pole.








Marcia is cutting up her fifteen yards of fabric in preparation for our dyeing day.

The next several shots are of the diagonal wrapping of the fabric on the poles. This first shot shows that you lay your pole on the diagonal of the fabric with the right hand upper corner end parallel to the end of the pole. Very gently you place the corner closest to you on top of the pole and start wrapping very loosely (this is harder than you think). You should place a rubber band to hold that upper right corner firmly onto the pole.


Here shows the pole partially wrapped. Because these poles are only 2 feet long (instead of the preferred 3 or 4 feet length), we will have to twist and push some of the fabric down the pole before we anchor the upper left hand corner with a small piece of thread (use thread that has come off the fabric) and tie around the middle very loosely with this thread.

With your two hands positioned as they are in the picture, hold your left hand steady on the middle of the pole and slowly twist the pole with your right hand while simultaneously pushing the fabric down toward the rubber band with your left. So it is a push down with the left hand, hold and twist with the right hand.
These are four poles that I wrapped using the above technique. I first saw this technique in a class taught by Jan Myers-Newberry who is one of the nicest and classiest teachers I have had.
This is a second technique that I use on some of the narrower pvc poles although it works just as well on the wider ones. First you measure the circumference of the pole (or you can be really fancy and trust that pi x D really works). Then you add about an inch to that measurement. A five inch in diameter pole would have a measurement of about 17 or 18 inches wide. Mark that on the lengthwise piece of your fabric (fold in half to make a 36 x 11 inch rectangle). Measure over 9 1/2 inches from the center and sew with your sewing machine a line of stitching using the longest stitch your machine has. Then put the pole inside the sleeve, put a rubber band to hold it at one end and then push down as far as you can. I then fluff out the fabric that is left over so that it will get some nice even dyeing. A variation on this founded my another friend Mary was to actually sew this sleeve and then to fold the fabric back over the sleeve and sew a second sleeve over the first (making sure you don't catch the first sleeve in your stitched line). You will get a gradation of striped colors with this variation. I have even done it three times with an extra narrow pvc pipe.

Of course you can always just wrap a pole and then wrap string around it and then push it down and compress it as well.


The next bunch we did were clamped using plexiglas (you can't see it in the picture but it is there). I first accordion fold the fabric in one direction and then accordion folded in again in the other direction, slapped a piece of plexiglas on either side and then held it together with these small clamps.

Here Marcia used canning jar lids so she will get nice circles in the middle. I really like these small clamps as they don't take up too much room in the dye bath.


Of course Suki had to put in her two cents about the poles. We had to make sure she didn't come home with me accidentally as I had so much in the trunk.

There are a number of other techniques to do shibori including stitching and direct dyeing which I will discuss in another blog entry.