College update

Those of you who read my ramblings here on a regular basis will know that I am in the middle of a City & Guilds course in Creative Textiles. You will also know that I have been raving about it ever since I started it so at the risk of boring you even further, I'd like to share a few pictures of one of the recent tasks....Shibori. A few people left comments asking what Shibori is. Basically it is a Japanese term for dying cloth.....to my mind, it's very posh tie dye!!!

To begin with, I sketched my design in pencil on my fabric (in this case it's calico) and then you start stitching running stitches which can be gathered up to create the tie die effect.

Gathering the stitches can be really quite tricky as can figuring out which direction to stittch because the direction of the gathers can be quite crucial to the overall design.

Once dyed, you then have the joy of removing the stitching which in reality is even trickier than the brain teasing of planning the whole thing, as not only has the fabric been dyed, but of course the thread has also been dyed and you can no longer see them!!!!

The results were so worth all the hard work though!!

 Basic sketch....

 Stitching.....

Gathering.....

Dyed piece.....

So if you have ever thought that you might like to dip your toe in the waters of the world of creative textiles, I can highly recommend this course. Oh and having a good tutor helps too, Jane is brilliant, very patient, knowledgeable and fun.