Origami Revisited

Recently I wrote about how I was experimenting with origami paper and pushpins to come up with new tie-dye patterns. I had tied one design according to the paper pattern, but I hadn't gotten around to dyeing it yet:


This was the pattern I was (sort of) aiming for:


I finally got around to dyeing the bedsheet I had folded, and here is the result:

I didn't get quite enough dye into all the folds, so there is a bit more white than I would like, but you can see that the pattern actually came out quite a bit like the paper one!

Of course, if I have a tie-dyed top sheet, I need to dye the rest of the sheet set to match. So I folded and tied up the fitted sheet semi-randomly (that is, no particular plan but similar folding techniques), and it came out like this:

Here is the matching pillowcase:

I had a couple hand towels and washcloths handy, so I dyed them too:

One disadvantage of all-cotton sheet sets is that they wrinkle like crazy. Since I'm still practicing my "done is better than perfect" policy, I haven't bothered to iron them. But these pictures get the idea across, and my kids don't care--they've already started arguing over who should get these sheets!

Origami Paper, Tie-dye, and Birthday Parties

I first started doing tie-dye six years ago, when my older daughter wanted a tie-dye theme for her sixth-birthday party. I did some reading, a friend pointed out the Dharma website, I got some supplies, I tried it out a couple of weeks in advance, it came out well, and I was hooked.

Since then I've helped about a thousand people do tie-dye: more than 500 first graders, a couple of Girl Scout troops, several birthday and other parties, my class for middle schoolers, several kids' day camp and family camp sessions, three corporate team-building events, and lots of random sessions with friends. I love doing tie-dye as a hobby, but I'm actually more interested in teaching it to other people. I have no interest in doing it as a production-and-craft-fairs profession--Harmony can do a much better job, and I recognize their distinctive work on people all over town.

I've mentioned before how I like to sneak in a little education when I teach people how to do tie-dye. Math, spatial skills, and so on. They get practice in colors and manual dexterity. And of course I think doing tie-dye is good for the soul, too. No, buying the mass-market tie-dye t-shirts at the local big-box store doesn't count.

Origami (paper folding) and kirigami (paper cutting) are similar crafts that exercise those same mental and physical "muscles". I did lots of origami as a kid, and I loved it. I've also done some kirigami; those paper snowflakes I did in school were just the beginning. True, you don't end up with the same wearable results as with tie-dye (including shibori), but visualizing how the project is going to turn out is half the fun for all three crafts, as is the pleasure (for me) of folding materials precisely.

Lately I've been playing with origami paper as a quick and concrete way to visualize how various folds might come out in tie-dye. The basic paper is cheap, thin, colorful, and easy to fold (I get 60 sheets for $1.50 USD at the local Daiso store). I've been folding it up in various wedges, squares, or rectangles, then piercing it in patterns using a push-pin into a small block of firm packaging foam. I particularly like the foam that feels a little soft and waxy (not Styrofoam/polystyrene), but anything you can easily push a pin into will work fine.


I put the resulting pierced "snowflakes" up on a window so I can see the light pattern through them (dark paper colors work best), and they are very pretty.


My kids joined in, of course, producing some beautiful ones of their own. My younger daughter folded her paper in random directions before piercing it, and she came out with some very intriguing designs.

These paper creations were so easy, so fun, so cheap, and so clean (no cut-out pieces to sweep up!) that I added them to the activities roster for my younger daughter's ninth birthday party (a crafts theme, naturally) a couple weeks ago. It was a definite hit with most of the kids. For the goody bags (party favors), I sent home the foam blocks and push-pins the kids used, along with a fresh packet of origami paper for each child, in hope that they might do some more later and keep flexing those brains.

Now I'm starting to work on translating a few of those paper designs into tie-dye.


I'm using the fold-along-a-drawn-line technique shown in both of my favorite DVDs about tie-dye:

• "Learn How to Tie Dye: Complete 3 Volume Set" available from Dharma or Amazon
• "The Art of Tie-Dye" available from Dharma or Amazon

Sometimes I'm stitching the designs with dental floss, sometimes I'm just tying the designs without stitching. The more complex designs need to be stitched so they don't slip apart.

I haven't dyed any of these yet, and they won't come out exactly like the paper patterns, but I'll post them when I do. In the meantime, try out some paper pattern piercing!

Dye Week at the Middle School

After months of off-and-on preparation work, I finally did my week-long half-day dyeing class for a bunch of middle school girls. We spent the time exploring several different ways of using "resists" with dye to create patterns on fabric. Like any class, it had both successes and failures, but overall, I think it went well, and both the girls and I learned a lot.

Day by Day

Monday we did basic tie-dye patterns such as stripes and spirals and rays, and each girl tie-dyed a white t-shirt. This is the same sort of thing I've been doing with groups for quite a while now, and the individual results mostly varied depending on how carefully they tied and dyed their shirts.

Tuesday we did stitch resist on bandanas. Stitch resist didn't work very well for the class. Most of the girls (grades 6-8) had trouble stitching their designs (on cotton bandanas) and pulling and tying them tightly enough, so the stitching didn't really resist the dye and their designs got lost. On the other hand, a shibori technique of folding and clamping silk hankies with various clips worked very well. Almost all the girls came out with strongly-geometric designs that were really beautiful.

Here is the group with their shibori silk hankies:

What beautiful patterns!


Wednesday we did discharge dyeing (bleaching dark colors to have light-colored patterns). We started with an experiment where we put Soft Scrub with Bleach on many different scraps of fabric to see what effects it would have. We saw that on the all-synthetic socks we got no effect, but that on dark blue fabric we got nearly white patterns. We then did designs on black T-shirts. Since I had gotten black shirts specifically meant for discharge dyeing, and I had run out of prep time beforehand, I hadn't tried one before class. They turned out to work well, bleaching much faster than I had expected, to a nice rust color (they don't bleach to white from the black). Several girls also bleached patterns onto jeans with stencils (I love that part--those jeans are now their own designs, not those of some brand name designer!). This technique was a big hit! One girl liked it so much she did more of it for the rest of the week during any free moments. We also did "regular" tie-dye on tote bags while they were waiting for the Soft Scrub to work.

Thursday we did "fake batik" (using glycerin soap instead of wax) on bandanas. The soap batik counts as the main failure for the week. Even though I had been successful with it in my trials at home, the conditions in class made it a lot harder. The main difference was the temperature of the melted soap when the girls tried to apply it to the cloth. At home, I worked right at the stove, and the soap stayed an even high temperature the whole time. At school, I couldn't have the girls working over the portable electric burner I used, so I took the pot to their table once the soap was melted. The soap cooled much too quickly, clogged up the tjanting tools, and hardened before going onto the fabric. Since the soap didn't penetrate the fabric properly, so it didn't resist the dye, and the designs were mostly lost. Wax would have had all the same problems under these working conditions (no heat at the working table). One additional problem with soap, though, is that very thin lines can get washed out in the soda ash soak, and many of the girls' lines were too thin as well.

Friday I gave them each another cotton bandana, and we all folded them into eighths (triangles). I then showed them the marking-pen-and-pleating technique that I first learned from Michael Fowler's Art of Tie-Dye DVD. They dyed their pieces, and then I let the pieces sit about an hour. I rinsed them in cold water enough so we could look at the designs and hang them out to display for the end-of-week assembly. They came out beautifully, with bold geometric patterns. We finished the week with a short but fabulous fashion show at the assembly.


Now That It's Over

I had a lot of help with running this class. One of the moms came in to help for the whole class, and my housemate came in for two days as well (many thanks to both of them!). For a class of nine girls, that ended up being about the right amount of help, so nobody had to wait too long before we could help them The girls did need a fair amount of help, especially with the stitching and the batik, though not as much help as the first graders I usually work with.

If I were to do this class again, I'd do it a bit differently. I'd skip the stitch resist and the batik completely and save those for the adult classes. I'd do more "classic" patterns like crinkle on white shirts and bandanas. One thing I'm glad I did right was to confine the discharge dyeing to using just the Soft Scrub, and not using buckets of bleach in water or spray bottles of bleach and water. I had several pretty high-energy kids in this class, and those could have been a disaster. The Soft Scrub is really easy to deal with from a safety and control perspective.

Budget is always a factor for classes like these. I had a budget of $20/girl for the whole week, or $180 total. Bandanas are good pieces for the class. They cost about $1 each in bulk. I buy them at the same time I buy lots of other stuff, like all the inexpensive white t-shirts (about $2 each) and black t-shirts (about $3 each) . Silk hankies were less than a dollar each and the results were very satisfying; I'd do more of those next time. Tote bags were about $3 each. I spent about $22 on four bottles of Soft Scrub, and most of it got used up! I spent about $1.50 per girl on gloves (they preferred larger reusable latex gloves over the close-fitting disposable nitrile gloves), and the rest was trash bags (for smocks), dye (the largest portion, about $25) and chemicals. I've already got many sets of goggles and most of the infrastructure equipment (squirt bottles and such).

One thing the kids liked, of course, was that there was a lot of stuff to take home with them, and it was even better because they had made the pieces beautiful.

So would I teach this class again? Oh yeah, next chance I get!

Inspiration and Frustration

I'm really busy these days. I'm still remodeling a house, and even though I'm not doing much of the physical labor, it's still nearly a full-time job (it's fun, though--better than a dollhouse!). I'm still working on my jeans circle quilt (a bit more than one-third done with the main stitching now). And I'm doing the mom thing (dropping off, picking up, helping with homework, volunteering at the schools...). Some days I'm lucky just to get a shower!

Today was a little different. I took a carload of kids on a shopping/exploring field trip up to Japantown in San Francisco.


We hit the Pika Pika photo shop, where the kids all crammed into a single photo booth for a goofy group picture, Kinokuniya Stationery and Gift, where I got some cool origami paper (but not as much as I wanted!), and Ichiban Kan, where I got some small plastic boxes and sticky notes, and most of the kids got various trinkets. We also went to the Soko Hardware store across the street, where I got a single-burner electric stove (doesn't everyone need one of those for heating batik wax?), and some of the kids got things like ceramics and paper lanterns. But my best treasures came from the Kinokuniya Bookstore, where I found two gorgeous shibori books for my reference collection.

I got Shibori for Textile Artists by Janice Gunner and Shibori by Yoshiko Wada. I had previously checked out the hardback copy of the Wada book from my local library (multiple times!), so I know it's good, and getting it in paperback was an easy choice. I hadn't seen the Gunner book before, but it looked interesting, so I got it. I looked at it later after I got home, and it's even nicer than I had thought initially.

So now I've got lots of fresh inspiration in my hot little hands, and not much time right now to go act on it! Shibori can be quite time consuming, too, especially for the stitch resist type (the simple shirt below took me a few hours to stitch).


Ah, such sweet frustration!

Tie-Dye Classes, Take Two

The new Mountain View-Los Altos Adult Education Fall class catalog is now out: http://www.mvlaae.net/catalog/index.html The classes will be at Mountain View High School, and you can register online.

I have two tie-dye classes in the catalog, "Classic American" and "Stitch Resist and Shibori" (descriptions below). I had been planning to teach these over the summer, but the classes were both canceled due to low enrollment by the enrollment deadline. It seems that quite a few classes, not just mine, were canceled for the same reason. One coordinator I talked to thought it was partly due to the recent downturn in the economy coupled with the recent high gas prices. It makes sense: if you are having a hard time making ends meet for the necessities, it's a lot harder to justify going out and taking a "fun" class--and you're probably spending that extra time making more money if you can. Fun is important, but so is eating!

So we'll see if the Fall classes get a chance to take flight. I hope so, and I've been preparing more class materials and examples for them (like the clamped shibori T-shirt below). And if it doesn't happen this Fall? Maybe Spring. Or Summer. I'm patient. And I can always use at least some of my examples for teaching my first graders and summer camp groups!


Class Descriptions

Tie-Dye I, Classic American Tie-Dye!

Do you want to make your own unique holiday gifts? Tie-dye isn't just for summer anymore! Come to class and learn classic American tie-dye folds and designs and make your own wearable works of art! IMPORTANT: bring white, 100% cotton articles to dye - t-shirts, white cotton turtlenecks, tote bags, socks, bandanas, etc. - washed with NO fabric softener or dryer sheets. In addition Sara will have a limited number of white items available for purchase. Wear clothing that can get stained and bring an apron. Materials fee $28 payable at first class meeting. Register online or use form on inside back cover before 10/1

200207 W 10/8-10/15 2wks 6:00-9:00PM MVHS/109 $51*

Tie-Dye II, Stitch Resist and Shibori

Join this advanced class to learn how to do stitch-resist and shibori tie-dye to make your own wearable works of art! IMPORTANT: bring white, 100% cotton articles to dye - t-shirts, turtlenecks, tote bags, socks, bandanas, etc. - washed with NO fabric softener or dryer sheets. In addition Sara will have a limited number of white items available for purchase. Wear clothing that can get stained and bring a apron. Materials fee $28 payable at first class meeting. Register before 10/29

200208 W 11/5-11/12 2wks 6:00-9:00PM MVHS/109 $51*

Progress in Various Directions...

Well, the jeans circle quilt still isn't done, but Lacey is pleased to point out that I've now got all the colored pieces arranged to my liking. It took several days, partly because I wanted to let it rest (kind of like bread dough) for a day or so and then look at it again and rearrange a few pieces. I did that process a few times until I was happy with it (or sick of it, anyhow!).


If you look in the upper right corner of the picture, you can see the baby fence I put around the quilt to keep Lacey off it. It was totally useless; the moment I opened it to go in (I'm too short to climb over easily), she was right there in the middle of the quilt, waiting to have her picture taken!

Now I'm slowly pinning in the batting pieces as I watch the Olympics on TV (one of my current distractions).

One of my other distractions recently has been playing with shibori itajime dyeing (Japanese tie-dyeing with clamps or objects clamped to material). I did a fair amount of shibori work, including stitch resist, binding, and clamping, when I first started doing tie-dye, and off and on ever since. I love the possibilities it provides, and I especially love the surprises that result from folding and clipping the fabric in various ways.

Here are a few of the experimental "play" pieces I did a few days ago. With the shooting star and the butterfly I'm experimenting with using shibori in a more representational manner.


By the way, if you are interested in any of the baby rompers, I've got them in my Etsy shop at http://amethistle.etsy.com. Much as they liked these, my own kids outgrew such things ages ago, and I'm working through my stash of white blanks. Sorry, my husband has already nabbed the big T-shirt!

When Is One Color More than One Color?

One of the things about Procion dyes for tie-dye is that they are usually made up of other colors of dye. Sometimes they separate or bleed into their component colors, producing an outer halo effect at the edges of the dyed area (similar to chromatography experiments I did in school). Not all colors do this, and the ones that do separate don't do it all the time.

Most professional tie-dyers use thickener with their dyes. This especially applies to the dyers that mass produce tie-dye for wholesale and silkscreening. The thickener primarily keeps the dyes from spreading too fast, and it prevents them from blending much with the adjoining colors, but it also stops the separation or bleeding.

In fact, one way I can easily spot a "store-bought" shirt is by looking at how much bleeding or blending the shirt has. If there isn't any, it's probably store-bought. The other thing I look for is the density of color. Store-bought shirts usually have very little or no white on them--it's all perfectly colored.

It's useful to create a color sampler with the colors of dye you're using (as Dharma says, "test, test, TEST!"). If you do it without thickener, you can get an idea of what separates and what doesn't. Here on my test T-shirt (T-shirts are cheap!), I found that a mixture of fuchsia and lemon yellow gave a great yellow halo, and chocolate brown bled bluish, for example.

Once you know the bleeding properties of a color or mixture, you can plan to use that feature to good effect. My favorite bleeding colors are the purples, such as Dharma's "blue violet", which usually produce a pretty blue edge. Here I've colored this entire shibori shirt in blue violet. I didn't add any blue, but the blue seeped under the clamps I used to create the resist pattern and gave me that beautiful halo effect. This is one of my favorite shirt designs.

Happy experimenting!

Tie-Dye in the Park with Dogs

I've been having a lot of fun posting pictures lately. It's been first graders for a while, and now it's back to dogs! We went to a park in Santa Rosa over the weekend, and of course had to wear tie-dye and take pictures.

Here is Moxie again, in his green and yellow dog shirt. It's always hard getting a good picture of a very black dog, but he looks good in the sun.

Introducing Cruella

Cruella is a Hairless Chinese Crested Dog belonging to some friends of my mom. Cruella doesn't have any fur other than the bits on her head, ears, legs, and tail, so she gets cold easily, even during the summer. She is used to wearing shirts and sweaters and jackets almost all the time.

I had passed along a tie-dyed dog shirt through my mom, even though I had never met Cruella. A bunch of my mom's friends gather at the park regularly, and it just happened that Cruella happened to come wearing the tie-dye shirt this time. What luck! I finally got to meet Cruella and she's dressed for the occasion!


Cruella is quite the model, isn't she? She's wearing a size Small shirt.


Cruella and Moxie look fabulous together.


Why Do People Keep Calling Us "The Tie-Dye Family"?

Well, I suppose it's better than "The Polka-Dot Family"! As a family, we often wear our brightest, loudest tie-dye clothes when we go out in big public places such as Disney World. It's purely practical--it makes it much easier to keep track of our group ("Are you missing a little girl in tie-dye? She went thataway."). My mom and my father-in-law aren't into the tie-dye thing, but they were good sports for our park outing. I suppose you could consider my mom's shirt shibori rather than strictly tie-dye, but it's close enough.

Finally, a good family picture!

Classes Coming Up in Mountain View, CA

Now for some more shameless self promotion:

The Mountain View - Los Altos (MVLA) Adult Education catalog came out last week. I'm going to be teaching some tie-dye classes in June and July for them. The classes will be at Mountain View High School, and you can register online.

Here are the descriptions from the catalog:

Tie-Dye I, Classic American Tie-Dye! #200207

Do you love color? Do you see tie-dyed clothing at craft fairs and want something that's uniquely your own? Do you have a desire to make matching garments for your family? Come to class and learn classic American tie-dye folds and designs and make your own wearable works of art! IMPORTANT: bring white, 100% cotton articles to dye - t-shirts, tote bags, socks, bandanas - washed with NO fabric softener or dryer sheets. In addition Sara will have a limited number of white items available for purchase. Wear clothing that can get stained and bring an apron. Materials fee $28 payable at first class meeting. Instructor: Sara Woodhull, sara@amethistle.com, is an experienced and patient tie-dye instructor. She enjoys teaching tie-dye classes at elementary schools, parties, and corporate events. See her work at www.amethistle.com. Register before 6/11.

Tie-Dye II, Stitch Resist and Shibori #200208

Join this advanced class and learn how to do stitch-resist and shibori tie-dye to make your own wearable works of art! IMPORTANT: bring white, 100% cotton articles to dye - t-shirts, tote, bags, socks, bandanas - washed with NO fabric softener or dryer sheets. In addition Sara will have a limited number of white items available for purchase. Wear clothing that can get stained and bring a apron. Materials fee $28 payable at first class meeting. Instructor: Sara Woodhull, sara@amethistle.com. Register before 7/2.

It's going to be fun--I can hardly wait!

Irrestistible Stitch Resist

Stitch resist, one type of shibori dyeing, is fun because you can better control where the white lines are. However, it's more work than the usual tying and dying.

Generally I stitch with dental floss, pull it tight, wrap the extra floss around the gathers, and then put a couple of rubber bands over that for a good white line.

Hearts

It's certainly possible to do hearts and other symmetric shapes without stitching, but I find that I get a much cleaner, crisper, and more uniform heart with stitching. And it's just one quick line of stitching, so I find that it's worth the small amount of extra work.

Letters

Letters can be a lot more complicated than hearts, so stitching works well for them. Here are pillows I made with letters on them.

After I stitched the outline of the K and pulled the stitching tight, I just banded up the rest of the pillow case like a bullseye pattern. Below you see the back of the K pillow (the distorted bullseye) and a side view of the pillowcase that shows how I applied bands of colors.

This M worked particularly well.

When I was feeling really ambitious, I did entire words on 12" throw pillows! These three took quite a while. The worst part was removing the stitching and rubber bands when I wanted to wash them out.

Other Shapes

You can get really creative with stitch resist. In this rainbow heart and bears tapestry, the bear faces are stitched, as is the inner heart and the inner line of the outer heart. I didn't want to take chances that my folding or tying might slip--stitching makes it much more secure.

One Color

A friend brought back this blue floral stitch resist tapestry back from China. It's about 4 feet by 4 feet and all stitch resist, probably vat dyed.

Here is a view of the right side of a corner with the wrong side of a different corner. The pattern differs based on which side the stitching is on!

I dyed this shirt after seeing the tapestry. It's hard to get the very fine detail of the tapestry onto t-shirt fabric, but it's still one of my favorite shirts.

The vine pattern goes around the back of the neck. For the stem, I folded along the line and did a running stitch through both layers of fabric, which gives it that double-line appearance. The more faded leaves are where I didn't manage to pull and tie my stitching tight enough.