This week's topic in my on-line course is arashi dyeing. Not my first experience with this form of shibori: I have done it before with real indigo dye.
In the photo at left you can see how the quarter-yard cut of cloth is wrapped diagonally around the length of 2-inch PVC piping.
The cloth is then twisted and scrunched as much as possible, held in place with rubber bands in the middle, top and bottom.
The fabric on the pipe is dipped into water and then put into a tall, narrow dye pot and dribbled with dye concentrate.
Warm water is added just to cover the cloth and it is left for an hour. Soda ash solution is then added and left for another hour. It's great fun to rinse out the fabric and see the distinctive patterns created by this form of dye resist.
Carol Anne Grotrian creates beautiful art quilts, many with architectural themes, using exclusively arashi fabrics. My challenge for this week's class is to use this arashi fabric either alone or combined with hand-dyes. I'm not used to such highly-patterned cloth so I'm definitely out of my comfort zone with this assignment. I may cut my quarter-yards in half and over-dye with a pale tint to give me a larger palette of colours.
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