Shibori DVD: 400 years of inventive design

My sister kindly gave me the new Shibori DVD for Christmas. Apparently it shows very detailed footage of the tools and techniques used in one area of Japan for various types of resisted dyeing! I am quite excited to watch it and will post a review here when I can.

Great site title, interesting site

How can you not like a website called WormSpit.com?

Because, let's face it, that's what silk is, right? Silkworm spit. Not elegant. Also, the pupae inside the silk cocoon are usually killed before the silk is reeled. Not at all nice. Making silk could be considered "mean", just as making leather is "mean". But I guess I don't feel all that bad for the bugs... they are, after all, bugs, and they are treated like tiny royalty until their deaths. In addition, even if you let them grow up, get out of their cocoons, and live on... they'd only live a few weeks more.

Perhaps I'll be reincarnated as a silk moth for my crimes against bugdom. Until then, I will continue to appreciate and dye silk.

gold-edged black

gold-edged black
Originally uploaded by tigerb.

This veil turned out darn cool. I dyed the whole thing gold, then stuffed 6" along the edge into a plastic bag and double-tied it. The veil was then suspended over the black dyebath with an improvised dowel-rod-plus-spring-clamp setup and dyed in Jacquard's black acid dye. This produced a lovely velvety black, and suspending the veil meant no black sneaking into the resisted area... I've had some troubles with dye making its way into a section protected by a plastic bag, even if I pre-wet carefully. But... Rube Goldberg to the rescue. The commissioner is quite pleased with it.

the importance of samples

If you are just a hobby-dyer like myself, maybe you don't spend a lot of time dyeing samples. It's time-consuming and not always totally indicative of your final result (the shade of a 24" square may not equal that of a 108" by 45" veil because you can't do exactly the math to say how much dye is equivalent -- not to mention the time and temperature variables).

However, I've started to try to do samples of any new Procion MX dye I try, because the color on silk is often so different from that on cotton. Case in point: Dharma's Charcoal Gray. I used it on silk with acetic acid and got... quite a lovely shade of puce! Uh huh. Samples are a good thing.