Friday, March 1, 2013

Woven Shibori with Card Weaving?

Our guild's challenge this year is woven shibori.  Shibori is a dyeing technique using stitching, clamps or other ways to resist the dye.  Woven shibori is weaving ties into the hand woven piece.  An example might be weaving the pattern threads of an Overshot with ties instead of a pattern yarn.  Then tying up the piece and throwing it in a dye pot.  You can read more from Catherine Ellis' website.

My good friend Amy wanted a small group of us guildies to document our trials with woven shibori in our individual favorite techniques.  This was beginning to sound like the iridescent challenge where we argued back and forth that you can't do it with tablet weaving.  "But how do you know unless you try?"  And it did work.  And it probably will work with woven shibori.

So here it is woven up before tying and dyeing.  We're doing the dyeing sometime in May, so you'll have to wait until then for the finished samples.

The pattern is 3 white, 1 black thread in each card setup to be similar to patterns found on coptic bands.



The colored threads are the ties.  They aren't really woven in, they are more threaded between.  I tried a sample with the ties woven in, but card woven bands are so thick I was afraid it wouldn't gather enough to resist the dyes.  We'll see how this all works after the dye pot.

1 comment: