Itajime Shibori

I bought a copy of "Shibori the Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dying, Traditions, Techniques, Innovations" by Yoshiko Wada, Mary Kellogg Rice and Jane Barton. This is a good starting point for exploring the world of Shibori.

Shibori is a Japanese term for resist dying fabric. It's an ancient traditional method of applying color and pattern to fabric and has been used all over the world by many cultures. Other cultures have different terms to describe resist dying of fabric.

Continuing my scroll around the internet for information on the technique called Itajime Shibori - which uses objects and folding to create a resist - I returned to Karen Britto's website. Karen has a great series of posts on itajime shibori.

The images are from my first attempts at itajime. Of course, I jumped right in. Didn't practice on paper and didn't get too concerned about the outcome. As with all hand processes, the uncontrollable is part of the fun of the process.

The large piece measures 44 X 72 inches and is cotton sateen fabric. A dense fabric, which accepts the dye beautifully, but doesn't allow even penetration of more than one layer of fabric.

I've begun to develop my own techniques.
Soak the fabric in a washing soda and water solution for a minimum of ten minutes.
Gently wring and hang outside on the line to dry.
Iron in the folds, keeping in mind that with the cotton sateen, the dye will not penetrate easily.
Clamp areas to resist the dye with  2 inch clamps and balsa wood lengths.
(More on the wood used for the resist later.)
I knew I wanted a linear design made up of rectangles, and that I wanted to try to dye at least four or five times using different colors.
Using Procion MX dye, I began with a mid range solution of  fushia dye dissolved in urea water.
I folded the fabric in half several times and then folded the corners in on an angle.
I randomly clamped the the fabric with the balsa wood.

The results were not what I expected. The dye penetrated the resist on the top and bottom folds and didn't saturate on the inside folds; the pattern was "organic" and not in a good way. I continued on.

Next the fabric was folded in thirds horizontally, and then clamped in a regular repeat pattern of one inch shims with  two inches in between.
The dye color was lemon yellow.
Now I had only two fold or three pieces of fabric between each shim.
I also added a very thin mix of sodium alginate to the dye. The sodium alginate thickens the dye and is used with Procion dyes when hand painting or printing. You will need to play around with the consistency of the dye and the sodium alginate solution. This worked better, still the middle layer was not fully dyed.

Color three was a golden yellow and I followed the same process as I did for the lemon yellow. I was feeling more comfortable with the shim resist holding and applied more dye and did more massaging of the dye into the fabric.

Next dye color was turquoise. I used the shims to block out two inch spaces and left a six inch space between.

This piece was dyed using a foam paint edger. I felt like it gave me more control. The size of the piece with the clamps attached was larger than any container I had on hand for dip dying.

When you are using hand clamps as opposed to C Clamps, it may be necessary to remove the clamps from one edge to another to dip the entire edge of a piece into the dye solution.

I did some massaging of the fabric with the gold and the turquoise.

Colorwise dying fushia, lemon yellow, gold and turquoise resulted in white, fushia, purple, orange, green, olive green, and turquoise.

I may dye one more time for black lines. (I'm sure that I will dye once more in black. The entire horizontal center third and a pin line on the outer two thirds.)

I love the piece, including all of the errors.

I'm deciding if this should become a large quilted wall hanging or if I should cut it to become one segment of a quilt I'm planning titled "Past, Present and Future. We'll see after the black dying.

More Itajime Shibori
The red and yellow came out as expected. I inserted the shims between each fold (at exactly the same spot), then moved the clamps as I worked around the edges of the folded fabric when dying, used sodium alginate to control the dye spread, and massaged the dye into the fabric. The fabric is a gorgeous, very light weight, cotton voile.