Winner #1 and Shibori
The winner of the birthday giveaway #1 for The Complete Photo Guide to Felting is Sally Gulbrandsen. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who responded. It was good to hear from all of you.
Last week, my local group met and we tried some shibori techniques. Bunny, who hosted our shibori party, has lots of examples and samples of shibori that are gorgeous. So she showed us her samples to start.
Lots of them still have the folded textures and the amount of work they took is amazing. I always forget how much work shibori is until I start doing it and then I suddenly remember why I don’t do it very often. Then Bunny instructed us on doing arashi shibori which means ‘storm’ in Japanese. It is a technique where you wrap the cloth around a pole and wind tightly with thread or string. This technique gives a diagonal line reminiscent of rain. Several of us had also done a bit of stitching in advance. I stitched one of my pieces in the mokume (wood grain) pattern. Paula stitched a piece of felt with some half circles and a few straight mokume lines. After wrapping our poles, we put some in acid dye pots and the others we used Color Hue dyes that require no setting or heating for protein fiber. The Color Hue dyes are quick and easy so if you haven’t done any dyeing before, it might be an easy start for you to try. Bunny ordered them from Dharma Trading.
I think we got some really great results. We had a fun afternoon but we all decided that shibori gives you quite a workout! If you’ve done any shibori, we’d love to see what you have done. Come on over to the forum and post about it!