Indigo Shibori

This is a little project I did for school, I wanted to make a woven banner that said ‘Weaving’ and a dyed one that said ‘Dyeing’ since we’ve renamed the class ‘Weaving and Dyeing’. The weaving half may or may not ever happen. (^_^)

I wrote out the letters in pencil, and went along the lines tying up lentils with dental floss. Dental floss works great for shibori, when I’ve tried it with cotton thread it has been a failure every time. (Dye mostly penetrated knots) The strength of the floss helps me tie the knots tighter, and as I use waxed floss I expect that helps to resist the dye better. That’s my guess, but I should try using cotton again, now that I can get it to work at all, it’s possible that I’ve just gotten better at the process.

The indigo is from my example jar (to show that the fluid is a clear yellow) of pre-reduced indigo dye from class. It has been mixed up sitting in the jar for several months, but it seems to have still worked! Yay! If it hadn’t I probably would have cheated and used some fiber reactive dye.

Untying the shibori is always exciting, I’m never sure that it will have worked! But it did, yay! I’m pretty pleased with how it came out. Now if I can just figure out how to relate woven text to one of the projects in our class… We dropped patterned tapestry weaving, which would have been the obvious choice. I’d love to add ikat though, which would be a super interesting way to weave text. Hmmmm…