Shibori dying with indigo is the craft you need to try this spring

Silk scarves I dyed with indigo using the shibori technique

Hello friends,

This past weekend I had the opportunity to take an indigo shibori dying workshop with Wax and Wane Fiber at the Lemon Bowl in DC (you've heard me kvell about the Lemon Bowl before).

Natural indigo dye is derived from the leaves of certain plants.  It's named after India, which was historically associated as a center of indigo dying, but ancient cultures around the world have used indigo to produce a beautiful, deep blue color.  It's also the color that blue jeans were originally dyed with, so denim blue and indigo blue are pretty much the same thing.

Shibori is a centuries-old Japanese art of dying using resist techniques (techniques that involve preventing sections of fabric from picking up dye, leaving them blank) and is essentially a much more complex, sophisticated version of the tie-dye techniques that we all now know as a summer camp classic.

In our workshop we died square scarves made of 100% habotai silk.  Natural fibers take dye best, and silk in particular absorbs dye quickly and responds with shining, vivid color.  Other natural fibers, like cotton and linen, can also easily be dyed with indigo, but the color turns out much less vibrant and it takes more dips in the dye to obtain the same depth of color.

All 3 of my pieces drying after being washed with soap and water

I garnered two major takeaways from this weekend's workshop:

1) Shibori dying with indigo is way easier and less messy or daunting than I originally thought it would be, and I could probably do this at home now that I know what I'm doing.

2) The art of creating a great pattern is all in how you fold the fabric.


To dye an amazing scarf you start by folding your fabric in a specific way (you can look up a variety of different shibori folds online).  I dyed three different scarves using three different folds.  One was a radial fold, which looks like a triangle once folded, and involved a diamond pattern that radiated out from the center.  One was a grid or square fold, in which you fold your fabric into overlapping squares and the resulting pattern involves squares with a repeating pattern in each one.  The third was a basic accordion fold, which basically results in stripes.  There are plenty of other folds out there, and other techniques that involve twisting, or binding your fabric around a cylinder with twine, but these are the basics and the results were so beautiful they're more than enough to get you started.

Then, you clamp stuff onto your scarf to create a resist, meaning areas that will remain white because the dye will be blocked from touching your fabric.  We used clothes pins, chop sticks, C clamps, wood blocks with clamps, rubber bands, even binder clips.

What looks like an exhibit on medieval torture is actually
a square scarf in a radial fold and covered in shibori

Then, you soak your fabric in clean water for a bit, with all the stuff clamped on, and dump the fabric, clamps and all, into your indigo dye vat.  Leave your piece in the indigo for 30 seconds, then remove for about a minute to allow it to oxidize, and repeat.  You want to repeat for however many times you like in order to achieve the desired darkness, but for a bold, beautiful indigo blue dip at least 3 or 4 times.

Same scarf after the dye process was completed.

Note the difference: one scarf was dipped in indigo 3 times,
the other was soaked in osage and dipped in indigo once

To achieve that gorgeous, mottled blue-green color we first soaked our scarves for several minutes in a dye made with a bit of osage extract diluted in water.  Osage is another natural plant dye, and it turns fabric a goldenrod yellow.  Then the piece took a single dip in the indigo dye vat.  I left all my shibori pieces in place for both vats, so the resisted areas on my piece remained white.  But, had I taken them off between the osage and the indigo, parts of my fabric would have been blue and parts would have been green.  And if I had added new shibori between the vats, some of the markings on the fabric would have remained yellow.  So with only two different types of dye you can achieve four different colors, not to mention many different variations in darkness.  In the future I'd like to experiment with other natural dyes in other colors.

Adding that first layer of yellow with osage

Next step, rinse the indigo out in the sink.  This is the only truly messy part; be careful of drips.  I recommend wearing all black clothing, and don't forget about your shoes.  Keep your dye vat as close to the sink as possible, and have a dye-friendly place to put your dyed items when they're resting between dips.  Once it's rinsed, lay out on a drying rack to dry.  You'll want to wash it again by hand with soap and water again before wearing, otherwise the dye will rub off on your skin and your clothes.  I found that once I hand washed my pieces at home with soap the silk became softer and shinier, and the color variations more vivid.

I highly recommend learning this craft if you're looking to add a new artistic skill to your repertoire. It's a high reward craft with great return on investment: the supplies you need (a few buckets, something to lay down on the floor to keep it clean, possibly a cheap shower curtain liner, which is what I plan on using, clothes pins, binder clips, chop sticks, rubber bands) are all easy to come by. You can buy the dye materials online, or pick up a kit from Wax and Wane, and a little bit goes a long way. The small kit I bought for $20 is enough to dye 5 pounds of fabric.  The most expensive thing is going to be whatever item you'll be dying, but you can actually buy silk dye blanks pretty cheap online, and in bulk.  Also, white cotton t-shirts, jeans, pillow cases, anything you have laying around (or that you find for cheap at the thrift store) is fair game, as long as it's made up of natural fibers.  You can dye yarn, or a cashmere sweater even.

As for the results?  They're instantly gorgeous and high impact.  You won't believe you made it yourself.  Super giftable and impressive, too.  The best part, though, is experimenting with the different shibori techniques and getting to surprise yourself every time you unfold a piece after completing the dying process.  I was super stoked with the how my green scarf turned out, in particular.  When I folded it into a square shape and clamped chop sticks and clothespins on the corners, I wasn't expecting it to result in a super cool diamond shape, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense.  I also didn't realize when our instructor said "green" that he meant that gorgeous, almost antiqued looking blue-green color.

I didn't realize that clamping off the corners of a square folded piece
would result in an amazing repeat diamond motif (see above)

I'm hooked and I want to make a thousand more.

If you're in the DC area, or in Baltimore, which is where Wax and Wane Fiber is actually based, it's totally worth the cost of taking the workshop first, even if you can find helpful instructions online.  It gave me the opportunity to learn by doing in a supervised setting, and it's nice to already have some experience with this before starting a potentially very messy process at home, having already learned tricks to keeping this efficient and low-mess from someone much more experienced than myself. There was also a real benefit in seeing how my classmates' pieces turned out and the totally different approaches they took from what I did, which is all helpful information that will inform my crafting at home.  And finally, you walk away from the workshop with a beautiful scarf that would probably cost you just as much as the workshop had you bought it in a store, only you made that scarf.

My classmates' pieces drying after being dyed;
it was so cool seeing how different everyone's pieces turned out

A classmate who was totally unafraid to experiment
and who took a totally different approach than I did

If you're unable to attend a Wax and Wane workshop, consider one of their kits to start, which makes it super easy to get going, and do some digging online for shibori folding techniques.  Then sit down and experiment because there is literally no wrong way to shibori a scarf!

How about you, readers?  Have you ever tried dying your own fabric before?  Have you tie-dyed before at camp or elsewhere?  Did you do anything beyond the standard rubber band technique or is venturing beyond rubber-bands new to you?  If not, have you found yourself shying away from dying in the past because it's messy?  Or because you're afraid of chemicals?  Or of screwing it up?  Discuss in the comments.