ENTWINEMENTS

I think people enjoyed painting their skeins last Sunday afternoon.  A little color here, a little more there and soon everyone is into fun colors.

Now on to indigo, the oldest and yet the hardest dye to use.  There is already a lot on this blog about indigo since the Japanese love indigo so and it is the most forgiving dye to use for shibori, so it is great for shibori novices.  Let's just look at some pics of indigo dyed cloth:

 This is a T-shirt with a few lines of stitched shibori

I hope you can see how many colors of indigo there are.

I will be preparing the vat, all you have to do is bring your yarn or cloth ready to dye. The fiber should be cotton or other vegtable fiber to take the high pH of this vat. For those who want to know about making the indigo vat you can read instructions here.

Posted by Karren at 07:40 PM | Permalink

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

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)

I promised you some pictures of finished things from our Dye Day. We did T's and cotton bandanas. In indigo we did fold & clamp (itajime), stitching (mokume) and binding.

Some pieces were more successful than others (per usual). We all seemed to forget that indigo does not penetrate very far -- the underside of a thick cotton jersey does not look nearly as blue as the exposed side does. Folding a T-shirt in half before making the resists protected the inside from the indigo. We did get some good areas (as hoped for). On our last Dye Day we used fiber reactive dyes that really penetrated.

Here are two shirts made with the same technique, but different styles.

I mixed up three fiber reactive colors and tried out the Dylon Black dye.

The Dylon black is really black but the lighter areas where the dye diffused in are definately blue. The tree is a stitched resist and the other is a combination of shibori -mountain path- with a tie-dye stained glass effect. Then there were some colors left over...

Used standard tie-dye techniques. Matching bandanas and T's.

And last was a request for a dragon.

And then the bag that wouldn't close got two drawstring put into it instead of one and it now closes tightly but in a line not a circle, and the bottom has a button.

I'm packing for my last show of the year, Crafts Park Avenue. Come and see some shibori.

Posted by Karren at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Yesterday was a Dye Day here at the ENTWINEMENTS studio. This is a day when we dye things for us instead of you. We have several each year. We do a lot of T-shirts and cotton; these require different dyes that the silk we usually dye. The request was for indigo this time ( the other choice being fiber reactive dyes).

We keep an indigo pot all the time. When not using it it stays out on the patio; it is in a small plastic grabage can that has a lid. So Mon. I brought it inside to warm up and added some thiourea dioxide to reduce and some more indigo stock ( see this entry on how to make and run a indigo vat).

There were 4 of us dyeing, and administrative assistant, a production assistant, another artist and me. We did fold& clamp, stitched and bound shibori.

This is a cotton bandana all stitched and pulled up.

Here is our stuff airing to get the indigo to oxidize.

The shibori resists also are barriers to the air and it can take the indigo a long, long time to oxidize completely. When you pull it apart you can see the yellow/green of the un-oxidized indigo.

We are still oxidizing, washing the pieces but will share them soon.

Posted by Karren at 11:32 AM | Permalink

I am trying to find a fail resist recipe for a rice resist paste that will take many dips of indigo - any ideas please---Mary

is a comment left on an old entry.

Since I do shibori, in which the resists are created by compressing the cloth, I would recommend that. It will take any number of indigo dips.

But I think that you mean a chemical resist that you apply to the surface of the cloth. I have little personal experience with this kind of resists so all I can do is refer you to others.

Joan over at magic of light, mystery of shadow has recently done a post where she did 4 dips with a rice paste resist to get to this:

Wax is used as a resist and it is called batik and Rozome. Betsy Sterling Benjamin has a wonderful book, The World of Rozome: Wax -Resist Textiles of Japan. There are many books on batik.

Another technique used with rice paste resists is Katazome-- Japanese for a technique where rice paste is applied thru a stencil and then the dyes, including indigo, are brushed on. This avoids the problems of soaking the rice paste and John Marshall practices and teaches this technique and has a website with a how-to section and a video.

Other chemical resists that have been/are used are mud, dextrins, gutta and a some special
products developed by dye companies .

Sometimes the resists must be applied to both sides of the cloth for this kind of long exposure to dye. An overview of all techniques ( not a how-to book) is in the amazing book, Indigo by Jenny Balfour-Paul.

I hope this points you in the right direction.

Posted by Karren at 01:09 PM | Permalink

I had a question the other day about how to get a dark color with indigo. The answer is many dips, But words are not nearly as effective as a picture, sweetgeorgia posted a picture of 10 dips . Scroll down to the 2nd picture and you can see the progression from 1 dip (lt. blue) to 10. Looks to me like some are dry and some are wet and wet makes cloth look darker, even so you get the idea. Indigo is not for the one-shot-mamas.

Posted by Karren at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here is a purse made from shibori. It looks to me like mokume (parallel lines of hand stitching gathered very tightly, see page 86 & following in my book, SHIBORI;creating color and texture on silk) and she says that it is indigo. Looks purple on my screen.

The other piece is green and she got the name almost right-- I think she meant discharge not disperse (disperse dyes are used on polyester and add color).

Most shibori is used to create patterns like these . Only silk can hold the texture.

Posted by Karren at 02:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I received this email:

hi! i followed your instructions for an indigo vat and it reduced perfectly to a yellow color and i was able to dye my shirt evenly with no trouble.

however, i wanted a REALLY deep shade of blue and found that I had to dip the shirt about 15 times to get the color I needed! and even then it wasnt as dark as I wanted. in between each dip i let it hang outside and air out for about 20 to 30 minutes, and eventually I started rinsing it after each dip to try to build up the shade.

if i were to double the indigo in the recipe along with the lye and thiourea dioxide (but keep the water the same) would this allow me to get a deeper shade with minimal dips?

i understand that the chemicals would make the solution more harsh to the fabric and irritating to the skin - but I am only dying 100% cotton fibers and i will wear gloves.

have you ever tried this?

Indigo is not an easy dye to work with and I congratulate on getting a dark indigo color. Try more indigo in the pot!

Darker indigo colors are very prone to crocking. Going slow and building up the layers slowly, up to 30, are used to get a non-crocking deep, dark indigo color. The indigo in the dye pot needs to be replenished as it is used up.

Not every one cares about the crocking and in that case a dark color can be achieved in 3-5 dips. It is always a compromise, fast vs. crocking. Here are directions for a large fast dark vat.

There are many ways to make an indigo vat, and this one has salt. The Japanese advocate, 30 dips and 24hrs. airing between dips (even so they have an abundance of dark indigo dyed textiles). Another source of info on an indigo vat is ProChem.

Finally I wash the indigo dyed piece in the machine with Synthrapol . Then I neutralize the alkali with an acid, tannic is my preferred one as it tends to darken the color. I boil up a pot of tea and keep the goods in it for a while, hot. This tells me if I've done a good job of washing also, if the tea turns blue it needs more washing. There are other post-treatments, with things like hide glue to reduce the crocking but I have less experience with them.

I use gloves because I don't want blue nails , a common occurance in traditional indigo dyers.

I hope this helps.

Posted by Karren at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's easy to get excited dyeing indigo shibori at the Textile museum in DC and the event 1 July.
Indigo is ideal for first shibori projects because it is so easy to resist. And the fuzzy edges have nice gradations. The hard part is the indigo vat---the second time you set up a vat it is straight forward. But now there is instant indigo, a freeze dried mixture that contains indigo, alkali and reducing agent and all you have to do is dissolve it. Here is an excellent description of its use. I bought my instant indigo from John Marshall, who was one of the first to sell it here in the US. Others sell it now in smaller quanities,Paraside Fibers. I would probably call Earthues and order indigo from Michele Wipplinger.

Once you feel comfortable with the indigo vat, it is cheaper just to buy regular indigo. Michele at Earthues has an indigo kit, her instructions are the best!

Posted by Karren at 08:53 AM | Permalink

This is my shibori on cotton T-shirts. Indigo and shibori are natural partners. The Japanese shibori still being made in Arimatsu Shibori is mostly indigo on white cotton. I am including some simple instructions for making an indigo vat. This article was orginally written and published as a SHOPTALK article in the newsletter published 4 times a year by the Surface Design Association. Indigo is not a simple subject so I expect to revisit it.

Continue reading "Indigo and a Simple Vat" »

Posted by Karren at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)