Thrifty Art Thursday: Shibori Dying with Tumeric

I've been stuck for a bit now. Artistically, things have not been flowing well for the last few weeks. It's been hard to get anything done. I don't know if it's burnout after my Christmas crafting frenzy, or just because it's so dark and cold and bleh. Either way, I am done with this self induced artist coma.

Begone boring!

Farewell facebook staring!

It is time to start arting again.

One of my favorite ways to get the creative juices flowing is mess making. I find it to be highly thereputic. So I decided to try out dying fabric with tumeric and alum. It was awesome. For some added interest I tried my hand at shibori stitching as well. I've been reading about it online, and I though it was a really cool way to balance the freedom and interest of the more usual tie dying patterns with some structure and more control.

Basically, instead of just tying the fabric, (usually with rubber bands) you use thread to stitch and gather the fabric and use that to resist the dye. I decided to use a scrap of linen that I had originally dyed with beets wrapped around copper (This was a bad idea. Red beets + green copper = a little bit of ugly brown)

Once I was ready to dye I dissolved about half a bottle of Alum (I got mine from Krogers) into a pot of water and soaked it in boiling alum for about 30 minutes. Then I dumped the alum water out (I should have saved it for later) and dumped the bottle of tumeric into a pot of water and brought it to a boil. I dumped my shiboried linen into the pot and stirred.

The yellow was glorious. Mexican yellow, Indian yellow, yellow like dandelions.

I took it out and looked in my pot. There was still lots and lots of yellow in there. So I went and got a silk shirt I had been meaning to reconstruct and stuffed it in my pot. The shirt started out a cream color, but it sucked up that yellow too. It's a bit darker yellow, and I'm thinking of sewing it up into a bunch of little ruched rows and overdying it with blue to make a green and yellow leaf shirt.

There was still yellow left in my pot.

So I went and got some muslin squares I had cut out in order to print some of my block prints on and another scrap of linen I had rescued from some very ugly pants. I stuffed them in the dye pot too. In a couple of minutes I lifted them up, expecting to see some happy canary yellow but it seemed like the dye was just rolling off my muslin. I though maybe I had exausted the pot of dye, but it still looked very yellow. So I added the last of the alum directly to the pot and Voila! Instant dye uptake. I rinsed everything until the water ran clear and let it dry.