Indigo Fabric Dyeing, Shibori Style

A few months ago, the Fiber Junkies enjoyed trying their hand at Indigo dyeing, led by Judy. She had shown us some beautiful examples of fabric she had manipulated and dyed.

I thought it would be nice to stitch up some fabric for an indigo dyed shibori.

 This is the fabric I hand stitched before the "big day".

 This is what it looked like after I pulled all the threads tightly and knotted them off.

This is another piece of fabric that I folded, accordion style. Then I placed an old slide on each side of the folded fabric and clamped it all together.  We had each brought a large variety of items to use to fold or scrunch or somehow manipulate the fabric prior to dyeing.

 This is a bucket of water with quite a few of our fabric pieces after they were wrapped and ready to dye. We needed to soak them before putting them in the dye bath.

Here is Denny, ready to go at the buckets.

This is the bucket with the indigo. The bubbly, foamy looking stuff floating on the top is called the "flower".

Judy is removing the flower before we put our fabric in the bucket.

Val stirring the bucket to make sure all our fabric pieces are in the dye. We had 2 buckets going. You can see that the bucket in the back by Judy has a few plastic rods with fabric wrapped on them.

After soaking for a while, Denny removed the fabric from the buckets and we hung them on a clothesline to dry.

 Some of them were so heavy, we laid them on the lawn to dry.

Those extra long gloves Denny brought were really wonderful.

We did two batches of dyeing.

Then we unwrapped our fabrics and hung them to dry some more. Look at all that wonderful fabric.

 Above is a piece of my rusted fabric. See it and another piece of rusted fabric below after the indigo dye?

 Below are 2 more of my pieces.

 The top one I wrapped marbles to create those smallish circular areas. The larger area on the right was a wrapped plastic hair curler. the lower piece was folded. See the funny shapes at the edges? Those are the impressions from paper clips.

 This is the fabric I had sewn and was pictured at the top . On the left you can see where there is still a little thread in the fabric.

 The circular areas on this piece were where I had wrapped empty thread spools.  It was all a lot of fun. The most time consuming part was preparing the fabric.