Itajime

A clamped resist experiment.

Sorry folks, I've given up on wasting my time formatting these entries.  Apparently the only way to achieve concinnity (I hope that's a real word and M-W isn't hoodwinking me, the red squiggle's hanging around) throughout posts is just to leave things in default, which unfortunately means Times New Roman--gag.  Well if you want pretty, skip to the pictures like everyone else.


In this project I wanted to end up with some cool hexagonal--or at the very least triangular-- repeat pattern over the whole of the fabric.   So I folded it in half lengthwise, then in half again lengthwise, then a la paper football, only instead of a right isosceles triangle I did equilateral triangles.  Then I smooshed the fabric all down between 2 vitamin water caps and clamped them with this crazy easy grip clamp thing I found in the garage.  Only apparently I could have smooshed it more if I'd used it the right way.  It didn't make much difference anyway.  I then dipped the fabric in some leftover green dye from a tie dye project a couple weeks ago, added soda ash, and left it for a while.  An hour?  I dunno.  When I rinsed it out, it turned out that the dye had really only highlighted the edges of the folds, and due to my thoughtless folding, the folds that were more in the center hardly got any dye.  The circles I was hoping would appear were nowhere to be seen.    End of round 1.

Round 2:  I basically folded it exactly the same except I tried to be conscious of which direction of folding would allow more raw folded edges to be accessible to the dye.  I had figured out how to get the clamp tighter and thought that was going to help.  I soaked in soda ash then dipped in a concentrated mixture of royal blue for another couple of hours.  I still wasn't satisfied--I wanted circles, by golly!  So before my dye exhausted I folded it up one more time for another round.

Round 3:  I folded this time just into squares because I was hungry and dinnertime and whining toddlers are hardly conducive to repeating the same time-consuming fold for the third time.  This time I let it just sit overnight, and when I rinsed in the morning, voila! there were my circles.  Of course that wasn't really the effect I was going for, but still totally cool. 

Round 1: clamped fabric football

Round 1: green dye soak

Round 1: results

Round 2: results

Round 3: square fold clamped

Final product