Itajime Shibori

I just added a few new Sekka Shibori fabrics to my Dye Candy Shop. I have to admit it I'm in love with the variety that comes from this technique.

Above you can see the folded and fabric clamped and sitting in one of the dye colors. My favorite tool for mixing and applying dyes is a nasal aspirator. I can suction up dye and transport it to another container to be mixed with other colors or I can mix the dye colors inside the aspirator and apply the dye directly to the fabric.

I tried a few different methods on these pieces. The fabric above was soaked in a soda ash solution before being dipped in the dyes. The colors are crisp and do not bleed into each other much. The plum color was applied using the aspirator after dipping in the other colors. The plum dye is a little more erratic in pattern because I used the aspirator to inject the color between each folded layer.

This hot pink and orange fabric was soaked in warm water for 5 minutes and then dye was applied by dipping. Notice the dye flowed out into the fabric and blended into the other colors. I think this fabric would look wonderful as an accent pillow in a teenage girl's room.

These last two fabrics were also soaked in hot water before being dyed. Notice the two white spots were the clamps were in contact with the fabric?

If you want to avoid the clamp marks on your fabrics you can use wood blocks, plexiglass itajime templates like those in the picture below or you can move the clamp to an area that already has dye applied to it.

I cut these templates from plexiglass using a jigsaw. It took quite a while to cut these blocks out. The saw blade would constantly overheat and I would have wait to avoid melting the plexiglass.

If you don't want to go to all the trouble of cutting your own itajime templates you may want to visit Rossie's Etsy shop.