Shibori and Mandalas

"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young."  Henry Ford

     Last week the Original Sewing and Quilt EXPO held the North Texas Quilt Festival. For the past three or four years, local guilds have been having great difficulty holding individual quilt shows.  The expense of renting a place, getting vendors, etc. had proven to be a financial loss for them so six guilds got together with the EXPO people to hold a joint Quilt Show at the Arlington, TX Convention Center.  Along with having a great show and more vendors than they could ever have on their own, they were able to offer many classes by well known quilters and fiber artists of which my daughter Andrea and I took advantage!
      On Thursday we took a class-"Mini Mandalas-Ice Dyeing" taught by Cindy Lohbeck who  is the owner of Hands on Hand Dyes. You can go to her website to see what all she has to offer!  Cindy is not only a good teacher, she is a lot of fun to be around.  We spent the first three hours folding  fabric about 20" square different ways using rubber bands to create areas of resist. Then we arranged our bundles on a screen clipped over a bin, loaded it up with ice then squirted the dye over it all.  We placed the whole bin with the ice and bundles into a large plastic bag and left it overnight.

My Mandalas-to-be under ice and dye.

     I wish I had taken pictures of the process while we folded and manipulated the fabric but I didn't.  As the ice melts and drips through the screen, the dye soaks into the wet fabric.  The fun is you don't really know what any of it is going to look like!  That evening we left our projects there because we were going to be back in that same room first thing Friday morning for another class with Cindy.

    Friday morning, Andrea and I decided to just take our projects home to rinse out as the sinks in the room were really crowded with people who didn't live in the area.  Now for our second class "Pole Dancing-Arashi Shibori" (Also known as pole-wrapping shibori, arashi (Japanese for "storm") shibori is a japanese dye technique that results in diagonal stripes that are reminiscent of storm driven rain.) The first thing we did was to take  long strips of white fabric and sew them into long tubes which we then crunched onto poles.  I did think to take a picture of some of this process.

One of my three fabric wrapped poles.

After we filled our three poles with various crunching techniques and wrapped with twine, we held the poles over a bin and, if one wanted a blue background, poured a thin blue dye over it all then painted on the darker blue.  If one wanted a white background, just the thick dark blue dye was applied. Then the tubes were placed in a large plastic bag with instructions to NOT peek until the next day!

     When I got home on Friday, I rinsed out my mandalas...and lots of ahhing going on as I unwrapped them.

Six of my mandalas on my design wall

The rest of my mandalas

Andrea's mandalas on her design wall at her home

I was just delighted with the outcome of this class.  I have been doing some hand stitching on mandalas that I have purchased from others, so am looking forward to embellishing my own mandalas...mine from start to finish!

     I worked at the Show on Saturday at the SAQA table, giving out information about our organization and signing up new members.  So I didn't have a chance to rinse out my Shibori until I got home.  Again, as I was able to see my final work, I was equally delighted with this process!

I have nine different pieces on my wall.  I had to overlap
to get them all in the picture.

Andea's Shibori

     Both classes were a wonderful source of learning new techniques.  Cindy had made up kits for both classes which contained materials that can be used again, for example the poles.  Shibori is traditionally  dyed with Indigo  (Egyptian blue goblet from Mesopotamia, 1500–1300 BC. This was the first synthetic blue, first made in about 2500 BC. Extract of natural indigo, the most popular blue dye before the invention of synthetic indigo.) It is a very ancient dyeing material; the dye we used is synthetic...symbolic of the original material.  One can get true indigo but the process is much more involved. 

     I hope these classes will be held again next year because I have had many people who are anxious to take it.  If any of you are of that mind, you can watch for class schedules on Cindy's website or the EXPO site.