After steaming the shawl for several hours, and letting it sit overnight, I began unwrapping the bundle and dipping it into rinse water. Holding my breath the whole while. No fear, as you can see, the rinse water is clear! That means that I judged the acid percentage correctly, and the dye molecules all found their way to binding points on the fiber.
It's always tricky calculating the ratio of acid with shibori, because not all the fiber is going to be in close contact with the acid or the dye. So the sight of clear rinse water brought a huge sigh of relief.
The other concern with shibori is that there should be some places in the cloth that were tightly-enough bound that the dye can't penetrate. I winkled my way into the folds of the bronze section (where the rows of stitching are closest together), and again, sigh of relief, the shibori patterning is there.
Meg, I'm sorry, but this really IS a teaser, because I'm not going to pull out the shibori stitching to show the results. Connie wants to do some embellishment with the stitching in place, so there it stays. The shawl is now hanging over a drying rack on my balcony, where it will be for a few days until I think it is dry enough to ship back to Connie in Northern California.
You'll have to watch her blog for the rest of the story. I'll post a notice pointing you there when it's time.
3 comments:
Oh, the two of you!!!
Looking fantastic! Thank you so much!
We've all watched this process from the beginning, so I hope when Connie posts it you'll put up a link to it, Sandra.
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