The first time I went to Japan Noriko took me to Kyoto and we went to some small shops hidden away behind blank wooden frontages in the craft district. We went to a fantastic place that made shibori silk scarves. They were all different colours, but not the stripey looks we imagine with the term shibori. They had been stitched and sometimes multi-dyed but others were single colours. Finest silk, left with the pleating as a texture. I bought a pale peach one, to use as a summer wrap for the opera. Needless to say it's only been out of its bag twice in 5 years!
Another place we visited was an indigo dyer. They have to dye the indigo fabric up to 20 times to get the really deep blue, so it's very labour intensive, and I imagine fairly toxic. They had hundreds of used stencils of patterns they use. I think they said they were made of a rice paste, and hand cut. I've had mine in the drawer for those 5 years. I did try stencilling with paintstiks and paint a while ago, but it was only moderately successful. Today I did a couple of pulls with the stencils under a silk screen. I mixed up some yellow and a bit of red textile ink, which made a very unpleasant colour, but then added quite a bit of white and it seemed a bit like mayonnaise mixed with ketchup. However, in the pull, it looked almost metallic gold until it dried, and the colour is much nicer than it first appeared. I did one pull on the reverse of one of the leaf samples and one on polycotton.
After that I spent at least 2 hours with photoshop elements, cleaning up photos of the stencils, as I decided they were too fragile to use for screens which needed washing frequently. My plan now is to get thermofaxes made of them, which are almost indestructible. I don't know if I would seriously use them a lot, but I like the mottled effect of the chrysanthemum one, and the plum blossoms are very appealing.
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