Yall know I love taking a class to learn something new and that’s exactly what I did last week! My friend Amanda wanted a buddy to go to a Shibori dyeing class with her and I was immediately in.

Sister Moon Studio hosted the class on Sunday afternoon at the French Electic. You brought your own items to dye, so I picked up a pack of 2 cotton tea towels and 4 napkins at Hobby Lobby.

Shibori is a Japanese dyeing technique that produces patterns on your fabric. Similar, but different from the tye dye that you might be used to. We first learned 3 different ways to create patterns on our materials and then had time to get our items together before dyeing.

I liked the itajime shibori technique the most. This is where you accordion-fold the fabric vertically, then again horizontally and creates a grid-like pattern. I varied the second folds I did doing some as rectangles and the others as triangles. I also varied the ends by putting some blocks or popsicles on top to see what the differences would be when they came out of the dye.

Next, we prepped the items for dye by doing a quick soak in water (and squeezing dry), then going into the dye for 5 minutes. For Shibori, they recommended concentrated dye for short amounts of time. They also added some salt to the dye to help the dye soak into our natural materials (use vinegar if use synthetic products like polyester or rayon products).

After the 5 minutes, we removed the items, squeezed out the excess dye and if they were something that would get washed a lot, they went into a dye fixative for 20 minutes. After another squeeze, we rinsed them out and hung them to dry!

After 2 hours my napkins & tea towel were home to dry over night. Then I washed them (separately), dried and ironed them and they were ready to put to use! 4 napkins and 4 possible place settings for them 🙂

To be honest, I also made a pillow cover that turned out horribly.. so it didn’t come home with me (I tried a different method and the rubber bands weren’t tight enough so it was just blue). But…. I was pleasantly surprised with how well the napkins and tea towel came out! The towel is in the kitchen towel rotation and the napkins are just waiting for an excuse to bring them out.

Now that I know how to do this, I think it’d be fun to host a Shibori dyeing night at our house! …After the renovation is over.