ENTWINEMENTS

I started a line of jackets this year. I use a gauzy silk noil, right off the bolt, to make the jackets. Then they are dyed (there were allowances for the shrinkage) then shibori patterning with discharge and over dyeing. We used all the fabric we had in Jan., having ordered more in early Dec. The new bolts came in May, and were used to make 4 small jackets. When I dyed them they had undyed pinstripes all thruogh them! Here is a shot of the jacket with a seam running though the image right of center.

This old weaver tried to pick out the undyed fiber, but no, it is spun in the yarn. The pieces I did get loose look like shedded plastic, a thin white film. UGH!!

I have continued on and here are some shots of the jacket.

It shows up as fine lines in the solid purple areas.

I'm sending the fabric back.

Posted by Karren at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is a piece that was origami folded, then resisted in my own way and immersion discharged. You can see that the discharge did penetrate well.

Some nice fuzzy edges, eh?
This and others that were done at the same time are here.

Posted by Karren at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Grace sent two more images of diapers, with more white. I have left the images large so that you can see some of the beauty in the shading, diffusion of the indigo.

Posted by Karren at 12:54 PM | Permalink

I saw and took the picture of this piece at the ISS in Harrogate in 2002. They were a series of banners displayed, made by a group of Japanese women, called the Shibori Group I believe. Cotton and indigo I believe. Anyhow I find this piece quite intreguing and has led me to an interest in Origami Shibori. Here is a detail of the same piece.

Posted by Karren at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One can use all the help available with unwinding poles!

Posted by Karren at 09:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Folding origami is the easy part. Dyeing it is the hard part. Getting dye thru all those layers is the challenge.
Dyes have different ease of penetration. I percieve the penetration to be the highest with fiber reactive dyes , so in orger of decreasing penetration

discharge (sulfur dioxide, a gas)
fiber reactives
acid dyes
indigo

My theory assumes that larger molecules penetrate less. Even so the book shows that good penetration can be achieved with even indigo. How do they do it?

First they buy ready-to-use indigo in a bottle:

Aren't you a wee bit jealous? I'd love to buy ready-to-use indigo.

Then they place the tied cloth in an appropriately sized plastic bag:

Then some ready-to-use indigo is added to the bag:

The air and blue indigo are removed from the bag and then the bag is clamped shut. This is the critical step-- having the bag totally filled with the indigo bath and no air. Here is another picture of a larger piece: left: expelling the air, right: then clamped.

Once you have the bag sealed, you can then massage the wad of cloth inside to increase the penetration.

This way they have achieved good penetration on dense cotton with even indigo.

Posted by Karren at 08:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Here is the page on tying umbrellas from the Japanese book that I used as inspiration for these two pieces. You can see the corners folded into the center (top left), insert a chop stick and some suggestions for tying.

All dyeing in the book is done with indigo. Here is a page of their results:

There are 3 variations on a theme on this page, top is a single layer of cloth, middle one has been folded in to the center once and the bottom one has been folded in again. The information is presented graphically and easy to understand.

The chopstick gives one a hard core to use to push the cloth open or pull it closed. A few more choices than with a spider web. Now you have a use for all of those single use chopsticks you get when you eat sushi out. Reuse-- do a little part to save the earth.

Posted by Karren at 02:58 PM | Permalink

This is the book, in Japanese, that was the starting point for a lot of the recent exploration. I don't read Japanese, but there is a enough info to be useful. The ISBN 4-915374-41-6 should get the book. It is all indigo on cotton. I will share a few bits of the book so that you can decided if you want it.

I know of two Japanese bookstores in the US, one in Japan Town in SF and one in Rockefeller Center in NYC. I called the one in SF and they sent it to me.

Posted by Karren at 08:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

While visiting my friend, Grace, yesterday I took a picture of some Japanese diapers she bought at Sri Threads in the New York City area. This is a narrow cotton sewn into a loop, you can see the seam on the left side.

And a detail where one sees the gradiation within the design created by the diffusion of the indigo:

The SRI Threads website is another good place to be inspired by Japanese shibori textiles.

Posted by Karren at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Another attack on getting the dye to penetrate all the layers in a thick stack of cloth created by origami folding. Use open weave cloth. So I'm doing the same folds but with a very porous cloth, silk chiffon, to try to get good penetration. Here you can see how porous the silk is, you can see all the spots on my print table thu' the chiffon.

Here I have folded all the corners to the center, forming 2 layers, and you can still see the spots.

Another set of folds. Now 4 layers of chiffon and you can still see the spots.

Another set of folds. These did NOT meet neatly in the center. Now with 8 layers it becomes opaque.

One last set of folds, now 16 layers.

I pressed and basted the folds in place. Then I inserted a chopstick (I have many in the dye studio) and folded the cloth around it like and umbrella. Parts were tied. Some parts can be pushed together to open that area to more dye.

After soaking in plain water this was dyed in a yellow gold acid dye.

At the end of that dyebath it looked like this.

Some ties were taken out and new ones added.

Then is was dye red with acid dyes.

After the red dyebath the ties were re-arranged and it was dyed in a blue acid dye bath and looked like this at the end of the dyeing.

Now to remove all the resists and see what we have.

The outside, the one exposed to the dye, looks thus:

I don't like the undyed cloth in the top right quadrant. The backside looks like so:

I can see that the blue didn't make it all the way thru. And all the way open:

My conclusion is that there are limits to how far the dye will penetrate even a porous cloth.

Posted by Karren at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I did the recent workshop on Origami shibori with Pat Freiert in St Peter MN the first piece I did was a hemmed thin cotton square she gave us, about 18". She had Procion MX dyes for us to work with.

This is a classic orgami fold: bring all the corners to center.

Fold all four corners in, and have a new smaller square that is 5 layers.

Repeat the same folding pattern, bringing the 4 corners to the center,

So now there are 10 layers of cloth.

But you can see that it was folded one more time; same fold, bring all the corners to the center.

So now there are 20 layers and a small square shape.

A chop stick was stuck in the middle of the square and then tied with string much like and umbrella. It was dyed in a aqua immersion dyebath, and then in a purple one. The piece was messaged in the dye bath, before the soda ash was added, to encourage penetration.

The final piece has 13 motifs but some are definitely paler than others. Procion MX is a dye that penetrates deeply but even so the color is not even on all motifs. Next I'll use a very open weave structure to allow more penetration.

Posted by Karren at 06:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)