Cherry Bomb Baby

I live in a pile of bricks with a fire puter-outer, a Halloween enthusiast and a pretend lemur, who sometimes admits to being my second son. I have a kitchen for flowers. I know all the lyrics to the Spiderman theme song and (am forced to) sing it everyday. I cook with color. This was a blog mostly about yarn spinning and natural dyeing. Now, it is fair to say, it lacks direction entirely.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Shibori Felt

The last class I took at Deep Color Studio (and this was not terribly recent) involved indigo dyeing and shibori as well as wet felting and nuno felting. Here is a Merino/tencel blend that was felted into a short scarf. We then sew through the scarf and pulled the threads tight which gathered the fabric up. This is shibori, a resist dyeing technique. We used a variety of weights for strings and sewed at irregular intervals so as to create a tree bark like pattern. This was the goal anyways. Then we dipped the scarves into an indigo pot that we made during the class. I dipped it once only and it came out like this:

I can't remember how long I waited to remove the threads and open it up. Maybe a day? Or two? What willpower! Here I am at the start:


And then? I see trees! Its kind of tree-like, a little moreso once it was ironed. It is very short and also very soft. I think it would cool with an old pin but I've yet to find one. I liked this shibori technique and that it is not typically used on felt. I haven't used this technique since but I love the idea of resist dyeing.