Shibori Samples--Mokume

My students have begun working on their shibori samples to learn the basic stitch styles to stitch shaped resist dyeing.  I always start them off with mokume as it is easy to learn.  We work fairly small so they can see results fast.  I tell them that mistakes are okay as long as you learn from them.  When we open their shibori up, the students know who's looks the best and who had some problems and they ask each other about it.  They learn from each others triumphs and errors. 

Mokume is made by creating rows and rows of straight stitch on the fabric.  You need to make a really big knot of doubled sewing thread and then stitch across a single layer of fabric.  The size of your stitches, how far apart the rows are, and how tightly you gather and compress the fabric will change the appearance of the pattern you get.  When I do an example for the students I use black or red thread so they can see it more easily.  You really want to use plain old white sewing thread as it won't stain the fabric and it is easy to break the stitches later (though some prefer using a seam ripper to remove stitches). 

The knots all need to be on the same side as each other.  The tails are pulled up, the fabric is tightened against the knots, and then you wiggle the fabric to align the pleats that form.  You can spray the fabric with a little water to just dampen it and this will help the fabric and thread to swell and it will be easier to tighten the gathers.

Once the fabric is tightly gathered, all the threads have to be tied off.  You split the double thread, untwist it down to the cloth, and then double tie it against the fabric.  You want the knot to sit flush to the fabric to hold the fabric tightly into the folds.   The mokume is then soaked in water to finish swelling the fiber and the stitching as well as to prepare the fabric to accept thy dye more evenly.

After dyeing, the knots are removed and you get to see the pattern you created.  Mokume is said to resemble a fine wood grain pattern ideally.  By lining up your stitches you can make it look like stripes.  Once you get a lot of practice in, you can control the pattern by your stitching.

The piece above was dyed in an indigo vat made from pre-reduced indigo.  I really love how indigo has subtle changes across the folds. 

I also have a slide show on Mokume I made to use with my students that can be found here.

Indigo Magic

It feels good to be up and running with my art again. I am hoping my excitement over creating rubs off on my kids at school. I decided to do only indigo with them this nine weeks. Some of them were a bit disappointed when I told them we were doing blue and more blue. Until they saw how an indigo vat works--and then it was "Indigo is magic!" They liked the subtle variations in blue it made on their mokume samples.

My students are doing small samples of different techniques and then they will work on a larger finished project. I have them start off with mokume--rows and rows of running stitch gathered tightly to make a woodgrain pattern. We discussed how your stitch and row size would change the pattern as well as how tightly you gather and compress the cloth. I think indigo is a little more forgiving than some of the other dyes in that it will give you those subtle in between shades in areas that are not gathered as tight.

In order to make our vat, I bought a two gallon white plastic bucket with lid at Lowes, a package of RIT Dye Remover, and package of indigo crystals from Paradise Fibers. $11.00 for a 2 ounce package is reasonable when you find out how much dyeing you can do with it. I used a heaping teaspoon of the indigo crystals with the bucket filled 3/4 of the way up with water. 1 tsp of the Rit Dye Remover is added to the water and allowed to dissolve and then the heaping teaspoon of indigo crystals was sprinkled over the top, allowed to dissolve and then gently stirred with wooden dowel rod.

You can see how the water turns a lovely green color as the indigo gets suspended in the reduction vat. It seems a little odd using dye remover to dye with doesn't it? Indigo will not dissolve in water, so it has to be reduced in water with the oxygen sucked out of it by the dye remover. Okay, that is a bit simplified for those of you who are advanced dyers, but I work with middle schoolers all day.

In the pics above and below I am doing a test dip to see if I have the right balance of indigo and dye remover. If you have too much indigo it can "crock" off and you are wasting the indigo. When it crocks off it is not bonding with the fiber and is floating on the surface of the fibers like a coating. If you have too much of the dye remover, it will strip out more color than it bonds on each time you dip and you will waste a lot of time dipping and not getting those deep blues.



The test strip is greenish as it comes out of the vat and starts to turn blue. I have found that different types of indigo and different types of vats will have a different green color and will also produce subtle differences in the blues you get. A natural fermented vat will have a slight purple to the blue--maybe because of the madder root used to help along the fermenting?

If you can see the slickish slimy looking dark blue goo on the test piece above, that is part of the "flower" or bloom that forms on top of the vat. I did not bother to take it off for the test dips. When you do scoop it off the top before dyeing, you reserve it to put back on when you let the vat rest between dye sessions. I usually scoop it onto the vat lid or into a small plastic container.

Below, we have students dipping their mokume samples and removing them after a five minute dip. You have to be careful to not swish too much and add air into the vat as it will oxidize all your indigo. A slow gentle dip in, gentle slow swirls, and slowly lifting out after your decided length of time. Since these are samples only, we only did one five minute dip. For really deep blues I would do several 15 minute dips, allowing it to oxidize in between each time. The really deep deep blues on some Japanese textiles are dipped over 50 times.


After a quick rinse in water, the students used a small fan to help speed up the oxidizing of the samples.
Stitches have to be removed and the pattern is revealed. The students asked great questions about why some people had more white patterns left and why some had more light blue and why some had hardly any pattern.
All of the students lovely samples drying on the rack in the back of my art room--tomorrow we will discuss why they look the way they do and talk about being in control of the pattern and getting it to do what we want when we want. I really don't care when my students make "mistakes" as long as they learn from them. It is great that these samples are not all perfect as we all get to see what happens when you do things differently. To be honest, my students are my own little dye experimentation lab and I learn as much from them as they do from me.

Mokume Shibori Tutorial

Another one from my archives on my computer! Let's see if I can embed this correctly....

I made this video (really more of a slide show) for my students when I was trying to teach them shibori. I have arthriitis starting in my hands, and to save my hands from the endless demos, I put this together so they could just hit play anytime they needed to see the process again. Hopefully, others will find it helpful! I now have a video camera thanks to Inspiration software and the lesson plan I wrote. I hope to have my students help me make a video of several different types of shibori this coming school year.