Blogger: Kathy Schmidt, Quirks Ltd.
Stitched resist shibori has captured my attention so I’m going to try some of that on dye day. It’s not something that you decide and do immediately, because the stitching does take a bit of time. These pieces of bright, bright yellow were headed for some soy wax and overdyeing but they are taking a detour to stitching.
I’ve read just enough about this technique to know that I don’t know much about it, but here goes! I drew a leaf outline with vein lines on this piece and stitched around it.
I know enough to make the vein lines separate threads from the outside line and that you have to pull the threads very tightly! Here’s what it looks like now, waiting for the dye pot.
Then I looked at some techniques and patterns online and thought I’d go for basic plain lines and see how that looks.
Hmmmm…how about trying some pleats and making a double line? That might be more interesting and if it doesn’t work out quite right, it will still have some kind of curvy line!
And it doesn’t look like much when it’s all gathered up either!
This technique often combines stitch and clamping, so I’m going to try that–in a very simple way, of course.
Hope to get some appealing results. If I do, I might actually do a bit of serious research on the technique and try to intentionally create an interesting pattern.
Aaaand—here are the results!
The simple curved lines showed up best.
The piece where I only stitched on the ends and then folded and clamped a shape on the middle came out all right. The stitched lines don’t show up as well as I had hoped, though.
The stitched leaf outline had a mixed result. Some of the lines showed up very well and some did not. Can’t state a definitive reason why, but I think it’s usually due to not pulling the threads tight enough.
There will be more experiments with stitched shapes! Learning new things is always such fun!
(FYI: this content has appeared on my personal blog, too!) – First published in 2016