Mokume Shibori Adventure #1

This summer I dyed a rayon skirt medium brown. The fabric had a slightly textured appearance of soft buckskin. I added too much salt water to the dye stock and found the over all effect boring and plain looking.

I knew I wanted to go darker and add some interesting detail so I pulled out my favorite Shibori technique books and decided on a Mokume design.

I used a wash away marker to draw stitching guidelines along the bottom row of the skirt. Next I added the hand stitches, trying to keep each stitch even, occasionally changing stitch lengths to add breaks in the linear flow of the finished dye pattern. The stitching took about 12 hours over the next few weekends.

I gathered the threads tight to add a resist to the fabric. I over dyed the skirt using two dye colors of black dyes blended together. Dharma's Better Black (#44) has a purple undertone and New Black (#300) has a blue undertone.

The blue/black reacted with the fabric slowly. It flowed out and into some of the light colored areas adding a blue/green cast. The purple black reacted quickly. It did not migrate through the fabric as much leaving behind areas of vibrant black/browns.

I refer back to these books often when looking for color inspirations and design ideas. The book on the left "Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing" by Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada, Jane J. Barton and Mary Kellogg Rice has an extensive pictorial reference library. I've spent hours combing through this book and have filled it with bookmarks of design ideas for future projects. The book on the right "Shibori Designs and Techniques" has great directions for many different Shibori techniques and love the vibrant color pictures in this book.