Blue

And just for fun, the blue version of the stitched circles.

Red circles

I did red and blue versions of the circles design also. They were done with a compass and fabric marking pencil so it was easy to get them consistent. Although, orientation issues would be user error. You don’t notice that until you’re all done and standing back and looking at it. But we’ll just pretend that isn’t an issue and I’ll only show you the good parts. I used binder clips to hold them to my cutting mat to make it easier.

The red one has more variation in color but the color is a bit darker so there was more room for shading from light to dark. I think the difference between the front and back is more pronounced also. The back looks like sediment kind of collected in the little poofs. The poofs on this one were pulled out a lot better. The insides of the circles look better than on the green one.





I need a lot more walls to hang things on. My office at work still has some room. I may have to start hanging them there.

Circular

Another practice piece. I'm please with how it turned out but there is always something I can learn. This was done two rows of running stitch as Hira-nui on the large motif and one row on the smaller.

One thing I noticed is that I didn't pull up the 'free' fabric well enough in the middle of the stitching in a couple of spots. The center and left side of the large design as well as left and upper of the small one. Even though those areas weren't stitched, because they were still compressed a bit they didn't get the dye as well as the areas I had pulled out properly.

You can also see the difference in the veining on the one side compared to the other. It matters if you pull out the little puffs to one side or the other. The darker veining is the side where the puffs were out.

Zig-Zag

Arashi Shibori is done by wrapping the item, in this case a silk scarf, around a pole or pipe. PVC pipes work really well. They're cheap and lightweight. They also don't absorb dye like wood. String is wound around the scarf to hold it in place. You get a different look depending on if you wrap the string around in the same direction or the opposite. After it is bound to the pipe it is pushed down to one of the of the pipe. If you twist it a bit as compressing it, you get a bit more ragged edge to the stripes.

This was the first time I did stripes of dye. I thickened it with sodium alginate, which is seaweed, so it wouldn't bleed or drip. I mixed it about 1/2 teaspoon per cup of water so it was more like paint. Not nearly as this as the green dye in an earlier post. The alginate also seems to help it hold onto water better. It has to stay moist for the dye to react properly.

The lines and color bands are in a zig-zag because I folded the scarf in thirds before wrapping it around the pipe. I did 4 stripes, 2 blue and 2 purple. Using a larger diameter pipe, or doing only 2 stripes would make the color bands different.

Shapes

I did several practice pieces for the Shibori class I took. For this one I stitched it all in one batch, but pulled the thread and dyed differently. Once a yellowish green, then blue. So I got four colors from 2 dye baths.



The larger squares, rays in the star and the outside row of the football shape were pulled up before dyeing and left in for both colors so they stayed whiter.
The blue lines were also pulled up before dyeing, but they were let out after dyeing yellow and before the blue. The yellow lines were pulled up after dyeing yellow but before dyeing blue.

The blue stripes were stitched as Ori-nui. The others were running stitches. I used stencils to help plot out the stitching lines.

Bright

Another practice piece done for the Shibori class at the Textile Center. Stitched with running stitches, soaked in soda ash then dyed. The colors are a bit much for me but I wanted to see how the color bands would look. The green in the center looks different because it was thickened to almost jelly like consistency. The other colors spread a lot more. I'm not sure I like how it looks . It makes the stitched part less noticeable because the dye doesn't cover as well.

Vine and leaves

An example of Maki-nui stitching for the long vine and Hira-nui running stitch for the stylized leaves.
Again, using black fiber reactive dye on silk shows how the color shifts.

Black

This used to be black. It was stitched then bleached. You can't see the design very well. But it is interesting that it turned kind of orangeish, rather than gray.

Circles

Look, different colors.

I really like how bronze looks on silk. It doesn't have much color shifting either, it's pretty consistent.
The stitching on the bronze one is Miru Shibori. Instead of using one thread to go the length of the fabric and connecting all of the circles, I stitched and tied off each half circle (the fabric was folded in half) independently. You can see how much clearer the circles are at the center.



Compare the bronze one to the purple sample. The stitching where they're touching isn't as distinct as it is at the outside. The fabric is compressed differently depending on how the threads are run. The purple is closer to Karamatsu Shibori.

Waves and circles

The stitches closer to the edge are Maki-nui Shibori. It is a kind of overcast stitch where you work the needle almost in a spiral along a fold of fabric.

The curved lines to the inside are Ori-nui Shibori. The fabric is also folded, but the stitches go through the fabric from front to back.

The circles in the middle are done similar to Karamatsu Shibori, but I only did one row of stitching rather than filling the circle. The hankie was folded in half so I only had to sew half circles using one long thread.

The curves are a bit uneven. I didn't follow my marked lines very well. But it is practice.

You can see the color shifting on this one more than the others. I even stirred this batch well.