Rust-Dyed Shibori: What Worked and What Didn’t

The steaming method of rusting was somewhat successful for the arashi shibori, but less so for the itajime shibori since I used plastic clamps and disks to hold my fabric in place. That was a bad decision. The clamps warped from the steam and didn’t hold the fabric. The same was true for the plastic disks. Here’s what happened to the plastic I used:

 

And here are some pictures of the fabric that was wrapped around the tin cans and tied with string. The fabric isn't washed or ironed yet, but you can see the rust patterning. Because it wasn't possible to compress the fabric and push it down the can, the marks are not true arashi shibori marks. Some of the rust will come out of the fabric when it's washed.

Earlier this summer, however, I did some itajime shibori at the same time as I was doing some botanical dyeing. I clamped some fabric to some metal plates, using 3 identical plates, one each on the top and bottom of the fabric and another one in the middle. I steamed this bundle for about an hour. Here’s a picture of the resulting fabric. This looks more like true clamped shibori than do the arashi pieces.