As I mentioned in my last post, the day job has been
applying enormous pressure over the past several weeks, and it’s put me in a
frustrating state of stress and fatigue that hasn’t left much time or energy
for fabric-related creativity. I finally
got a bit of a break over the weekend, however, with a wonderful two-day
shibori indigo dyeing workshop with Akemi Nakano Cohn, sponsored by the 2013 Maiwa Symposium.
Here are some of my
creations:
I can’t rave enough about Akemi’s inspiring workshop. I’ve collected Japanese cottons for many
years and know a fair amount about the dyeing techniques to produce them, but I
had never had the chance to try indigo dyeing myself. After just two days with Akemi, however, I feel
ready to forge ahead on my own, assuming I can figure out where to set up a
dyeing station in our house. On the
first morning, we learned how to mix the dye stock solution and prepare the dye
bath, and then we embarked upon developing a wide variety of shibori
techniques, including itajime (fold and clamp methods), nui shibori (hand
stitching and gathering), kanoko and other tying/knotting techniques, plus arashi
and bomaki (two forms of pole wrapping).
We really covered a lot of ground in just two six-hour sessions!
Altogether, I dyed a dozen different samples. We started with itajime, and here are my
first two pieces:
Can you see how they were dyed? Unfortunately, I didn’t take photos--too busy
prepping fabric! Basically, itajime
involves accordion pleating followed by clamping, which produces all manner of
visual effects. In the piece on the
right, which was my very first effort, I pleated the fabric lengthwise into
twelve sections, and then pleated into fourths in the other direction, which
gave me a small rectangular shape. I
then clamped with chopsticks and rubber bands for a resist (which yielded the
chevron lines that you see), plus some clothespins here and there for good
measure. For the piece on the left, I
pleated lengthwise in fourths, and then I pleated in an equilateral triangle
shape and clamped with chopsticks. I
also tried a pair of clothespins in each corner, but the folded fabric was too
thick, and the clothespins basically fell off in every round of dyeing.
Both fabrics are a lightweight organic cotton from Maiwa Supply. The first fabric went through
the dye bath twice, while the second had four rounds of dyeing. Indigo dyeing requires multiple rounds of
dipping in order to produce dark colors, so it requires a lot of patience. It's hard to resist the temptation to unwrap your fabric prematurely to see how the dyeing pattern looks!
I’ll say more about what it was like to work with the dye bath in a
later posting. Stay tuned!
