Shibori Sculptures

Japanese Shibori is a traditional textile painting technique that I thought would be fun to introduce to a couple of students today. When I explained the process, they replied, "so it's tie-dye"

Well yes, that's true. It's basically tie-dye. But we are going to use silk and paint with dyes!  And then we are going to make sculptures out of it!

And with that I received the look that I have come to know over the many years of being a mom that says, "you are nutty"

But thankfully my students are use to my nutty ideas and so they took a deep breath and followed along with me. One student wrapped her silk up with rubber band ties and the other knotted her silk by hand.

Then they each chose an analogous color palette, which happened to be the same palette, and began applying the dye. Once set, we gave them a quick iron to dry them out and then it was time to use them for sculpting.

But how in the world do you use silk to create a sculpture?

Well in our case, I had some Stiffy fabric glue but any medium that hardens will do. We dipped the silk into a small bowl filled with the stiffener and then squeegeed off the excess. They were then free to wrap and drape around a variety of things of their choosing I had in the studio.

Old bottles, styrofoam bowls and anything else they could use for a temporary surface to hold their sculpture until stiff and dry.

And then because I'm impatient, they spent the last half hour creating chalk pastels drawings without any comment from me

and they choose pigs flying because, well, when am I EVER without comment

while I used the blowdryer to speed up the process of the fabric hardening so we could see the sculptures finished.

And how amazing they turned out to be!

10 year old, silk Shibori sculpture

Too bad my photography skills are not as amazing....

What you can't tell in this picture is that this sculpture is a vessel. The artist will be able to keep her earrings or other things inside of it at home.

And they are so sturdy, they can choose to arrange the sculpture in whatever way they want too. Since I'm not sure how this artist will finally decide to present her work, here are a couple of different positions of the sculpture.  

I think it gives you a good idea on just how amazing these things are once they are hardened.  

12 year old, Shibori sculpture from silk

This is the same work presented in three different ways.  I love the organic quality of the art.  The silk is so beautiful and they are much more breathtaking in person.

I could not be more thrilled with this project and can hardly wait to try it again very soon!