A TECHNIQUE DRIVEN Blog dedicated to mastery of surface design techniques. First we dye, overdye, paint, stitch, resist, tie, fold, silk screen, stamp, thermofax, batik, bejewel, stretch, shrink, sprinkle, Smooch, fuse, slice, dice, AND then we set it on fire using a variety of heat tools.

Sunday, October 21, 2012

My Try at 3-D Shibori--Quilter Beth


I finally had a chance to try this month’s technique. I didn’t have time to run out to get some marbles and cool polyester fabric, but I had some poly on hand from when we did a method where we actually “set fabrics on fire.” I used plastic buttons of varying sizes and tied them up in the polyester with crochet thread. Here is what it looked like when I had it tied up.
Once I got it all tied up, I plunked it into some BOILING water and kept it from floating by placing another pan on top.
After 30 minutes of boiling, I used tongs to remove the fabric from the boiling pot and placed it into a pan of ice water. I then placed it on a towel to dry. Here is my finished product.
Before I got this posted, I had time to try some more experiments. Nienke and I had the same idea about using rocks and disperse-dyed fabric. This time, in addition to the buttons, I decided to try the process with rocks and those rounded glass pieces you put into a vase to secure the stem of a flower. Disperse dyeing was one of our previous projects here on the Fire blog, so I decided to use some of that fabric for this project. Here are the pieces before the process.


Fabrics tied and ready to boil.
Here I have untied the pieces after boiling, dunking into ice water, and drying.
I really like the texture achieved with this technique. I was looking at these pieces and trying to decide which shapes appeal to me the most. I think I'd have to choose the rocks; I like that all the shapes are not uniform. I’m thinking several pieces done like this might look really cool “caged” in my bias strips for a new piece in my series.

Oh and if you’d like to see how I have actually used some of the beautiful fabrics we have created on the Fire blog, check out my post here. In the piece I have shown, I have used hand-dyed flour-paste-resist fabric, sugar-syrup-resist fabric, and snow-dyed fabric in the piece.

7 comments:

  1. This looks like fun! But I'm curious how you will actually use this in a piece so I'll keep checking out your blog. What kind of dye did you use for the poly? Your colors turned out really great.

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  2. Check out this blog post (http://andthenwesetitonfire.blogspot.com/2011/11/disperse-dyeing-quilter-beth.html). It explains what dyes I used and how the dyeing process went. It was done for one of our other experiments on this blog. I'm not quite sure how I'll use the fabric; but if you have followed any of my bias series pieces on my blog, you might get an idea of what I have in mind.

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  3. Sooo happy that it worked out well in your experiment, so I will keep confidence and try again! Love the bright colours and textures. Thanks for sharing!

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  4. VERY cool! Love how these all turned out but I especially love the one resulting from the use of rocks.

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  5. Great Job! I had wondered about using the polyester fabric I had dispersed dyed a few month ago for this technique. Great to know that it worked!

    I had also considered using rocks but the only ones I had handy were in my driveway and they are more gravely with sharper edges. I didn't think I would like to work with them.

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  6. I love this technique and want to try it.
    I am assuming once they are boiled and dry, you remove the rocks, buttons etc for use?

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  7. Yes, Kathi, you do remove whatever you had tied in the polyester before using it. If you try this technique, I'd love to see what you do with it. Thanks for commenting.

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