Snow-Dyed Shibori: Methods for Preparing Your Fabrics (1)

When you are doing snow-dyed shibori, you have to prepare your fabrics for dyeing in the same way as you would if you were doing ordinary shibori dyeing. The only difference is that you have to take into account the size of the containers you’re using for snow dyeing and make sure that your prepared pieces will fit into those containers.

I’ve experimented with both arashi shibori and itajime shibori using the snow-dyed method. I have never tried stitched shibori with snow dyeing but I see no reason why this can’t be done.

Below are some pictures of fabric that I have gotten ready for snow dyeing. Later I will show you the results.

Here, I am preparing fabric for clamping:

 The prepared fabric is being held by a heavy clamp.

The remaining pictures show other methods of preparing fabric using chopsticks, clamps and resists. In the arashi example, I have sewn fabric tubes, stretched them on PVC pipes, and compressed the fabric.