Color Creations

After a year of doing nothing due to a couple of moves (home renovations) and everything being in storage, I am finally starting to get back on track to creating again. Unfortunately, my forays into shibori have been rather disappointing. Not ready to give up, going back to the proverbial drawing board started a search through books and online reources to figure out how I had done what I did in the past to be able to get the same results as before.

For some reason, I was not getting the saturation I wanted with the folded pieces, even without a clamp. The end result was either not enough color or too much as with the dinner napkins and T-shirt below.

Of course, there are always those times when even though you don't get the result you expected, the outcome is still attractive. Such was the case with the dinner napkins below.

Even though I still haven't reproduced anything that looks like what I did before, I am starting to do more with clamping as a resist. It's a lot less labor intensive than stitched resists (haven't graduated to starch yet) and fairly easy to do with single color dyeing. I am having success with small pieces of fabric and excited to try and replicate that success on a larger scale.

The three brown pieces were done in a bucket with Dylon. I used less water than what the directions said because the full four cups had produced a much lighter brown with a greenish tinge previously. (Still trying to figure out how to fix that piece.)

I also tried using liquid RIT in the washing machine for the first time, and just like with everything, some stuff came out well and some stuff didn't. One thing I've found with the RIT so far, at least in the washer, is that I can't really get the true color I am going for since I can't control the amount of water. On two different attempts, the color came out way lighter than it was supposed to except for the light blue denim which came out darker because it was already a light shade.

For single color dyeing, I am still getting the best results with Dylon, though for multicolored fabrics, I still use cold water fiber reactive dyes. Even though they take a little more time and effort, there is a definite advantage to being able to apply multiple colors at once.