Double Dye!
My friend Suzie and I just finished up a two part class at the Textile Center called Double Dyeing. It was all about shibori dyeing and taught by Sandra Brick, a wonderful teacher who was great for pulling me away from my left-brained habits and pushing my comfort zone to the limit. Put purple next to orange? Pink next to green? Not in my manufacturing world you don’t – you get brown muck. But in Double Dyeing, you get truly beautiful results.
Shibori is the Japanese word for putting patterns on cloth by using several different methods of dyeing. In our first class we learned how to braid, twist, clamp, and bind silk scarves. When submerged in the dye baths, the areas of fabric that are held tightly together resist the color and leave behind beautiful patterns.
We also did some discharge dyeing. We took black cloth, clamped it, bleached it to reveal any color that might be underneath, and then reclamped & redyed it.
Sandra took us to the next level by having us take our single dyed scarves, re-clamp/twist/bind/braid them and throw them into another dye bath. The results were stunning.
Our second week we learned the arashi, or pole-dyeing, method. We used big fat wine bottles instead of poles (or trees, like the Japanese do), but the idea is the same.
Sandra almost made my head explode when she reclamped my blue & green scarf and threw it in the plum bath. Triple dyeing? Beautiful.
Such a fantastic class – hooray for Double Dye!!
Themocracy