karyn has posted some lovely photos of the student's work from friday's ombre and shibori class on her flickr.
it was the first time that we had used synthetic dyes for a class at the workroom - decided it would be nice to offer a quick three hour class where students could get their feet wet. it was great fun, and there was some beautiful results, like this itajime sample that jen made - i love how the yellow and purple shades blend together to make more muted colours. arounna and margie also posted these nice shots of the things they made in the class.
well, the experiment with these scarves was to see what would happen if i used some shibori resist techniques, but then rather than use the traditional indigo, use an immersion dye. i already knew that the reason indigo is the dye of choice for shibori is that the item being dyed doesn't need to stay long in the bath, and indigo is relatively slow to strike. so i knew what i was up against - dyeing a shibori item in a cochineal bath, for example, means that it has to cook in the bath for at least 45 minutes - tons of time for the dye to bleed in, and i'm trying to keep it out. which is of course what happened. my first attempt was a clamped (or itajime) piece - basically you fold the fabric up and clamp pieces of wood on either side of your bundle.
with indigo it's possible to get a fairly clean crisp line, and a huge contrast between white and blue. but as you can see, my result was much more blurred and subtle - so this is one of the yellow osage scarves from the last post, clamped then overdyed with cochineal:
much subtler than what i was going for, but still quite lovely i think. and of course when you actually wear a scarf, the pattern gets a bit lost anyways and it becomes a lovely jumble of soft yellows and pinks:
so my next thought was that rather than overdyeing my cochineal scarves i would try to just post-mordant them, since this means less time in the dyebath. i clamped up one of my pink cochineal scarves and did a post mordant of iron, which turns cochineal from soft pink to a lovely muted purple. again, the results were not what i had hoped, but still interesting:
and again, quite a nice jumble of colours when worn:
i also tried one of each colour scarf pole-wrapped, which is one of my favorite (and easiest!) shibori techniques. the yellow scarf worked, kind of, but for the pink one the iron bled completely through, so i was basically left with a solid purple scarf (though at least it's a gorgeous colour). here's a photo of the osage then cochineal scarf - you can see a bit of the pattern of the pole wrapping, but it's very far from the dramatically beautiful results you can achieve with indigo.
so....not so great. but i've also realised that the next big challenge in having a blog is getting better at taking pictures - especially of static things like fabric, and especially when the thing i may want to most convey is colour! not so good at it. if anyone has any tips for how to take photos to give the best representation of the colour of things, well.....i clearly need help!
i was happy that i kept one of each of these scarves behind. i'm teaching the final session of this round of natural dyeing at the workroom on monday, and we'll be dyeing with indigo, so i plan to take the leftover vat home and attempt to do some 'better' shibori with the indigo........
i've been teaching so many natural dye classes at the workroom, but felt like i hadn't been doing much dyeing of my own lately. my hats keeps me so busy for so much of the year, but the late winter and spring is when i have the most time to play and experiment, and it's this that i'd like to be sharing with you here.
so, i wanted to play around with some basic shibori techniques, and decided that scarves are an easy vehicle to start with. shibori is generally done with indigo or other vat dyes, but i wanted to see if i could have some success using immersion dyeing.
as always with natural dyeing, i began with mordanting the fabric, first with a tannin, since my fabric is a plant fibre (i found some lovely bamboo jersey which is super soft and has a beautiful drape), and then with a combination of alum and tartar. i'm more used to dyeing wool, which doesn't require the tannin step, and i'm always a bit surprised at how brown the tannin turns the fabric:
next i decided to begin with a first layer of colour, unlike traditional shibori, where you would begin with white fabric. i had six scarves, so i dyed three with osage and three with cochineal.
the resulting colours were a lovely and soft yellow and pink:
i have the scarves all clamped and bound up now, ready for the next layer of colour......
