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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Disappearing Shibori

I spent today at a wonderful workshop run by ATASDA NSW in  Sydney with Barbara Schey, renowned shibori textile artist.  Barbara is part of a great exhibition "Scarf"on at the moment by the World shibori Network Australia in the Barometer Gallery, Paddington, in Sydney.  For those of you in the area I thoroughly recommend visiting before it closes on 3 October.
Barbara was showing us some techniques for creating shibori patterns by discharging dye from black fabric.  She has some amazing blocks and clamps largely homemade as is typical of her thrifty self and she was typically generous in letting us loose on them to experiment.  There was no end to our samples as she'd  kindly brought along further cotton fabric supplies for us to purchase and Sylvia of silksational was also on hand with silk - dangerous temptation!

Barbara has a great laboursaving device for binding fabric on to a pole to create arashi designs.







I wrapped plain black cotton homespun using it and discharged the dye using bleach and vinegar to produce this piece of fabric. 

I love the herringbone pattern myself. Barbara's husband had 'run up' that piece of hardware for her, of course.  I can't see mine doing that somehow - buys me great textile works of art but not constructively good with a hammer!



Shaped wooden blocks were clamped around the folded cotton voile, wrapped in string and then treated with bleach and vinegar to produce these patterns:

It's always interesting to see the different colours that the different black fabrics can be discharged to.
As well as discharging cotton and other plant based fabrics we looked at silk, using TUD and vinegar to discharge the colour.



I played around with black silk georgette, using marbles and elastic bands as resists to produce this piece of fabric - a bit more organic than I expected but definitely has possibilities.


There was so much more we learned about but ran out of experimenting time, like degumming and melting back lame that I left buzzing with ideas - so many plans, so little time.......

1 comment:

ferinn said...

Looks like you had a wonderful time.Like you say there are so many possibilities but the time for play seems to disappear and you never quite have the room or the right equipment.Excuses,excuses!