Textile Swatches

How it's made: Clamp Dye Resist fabric.

 

One of our new textiles, 'Colaba' from our soon to be released collection, 'Bombay Glitz' is handmade by a Clamp Dye Resist process, also called Itajime.

It basically involves making folds in the fabric and then using a carved wood shape as a resist. This wood resist needs to be placed on both sides of the folded cloth and then is held together tightly with a clamp.

Here are some images from our process-

Bringing in the muscle to tighten the clamps!

The clamped fabric is then soaked in water to make it more absorptive to the dyeing process.

It is then placed in the dye bath.

After it is removed from dyeing.

And the clamps are removed, but the fabric is still folded...

And voila! the finished product...

And here's a short video documentation. 

What do you think? Do you like the result?

Here's a great book, 'Shibori: The Inventive Art of Japanese Shaped Resist Dyeing' if you have an interest to explore this technique. It's written by my friend and mentor, Yoshiko Wada, and Mary Kellog Rice and Jane J. Barton.

Thoughts of Japan

Hearing the sad news and watching the horrific images of the natural disaster in Japan, helps put life into perspective. Our everyday grievances are so unimportant in the bigger picture..

My heart goes out to the people affected by this tragedy. I reminisce the wonderful times I spent in Japan in the mid-90s, enjoying the caring hospitality of my hosts and friends at NUNO Corporation. I had the fortunate opportunity of working with NUNO. It gave me my foundation in textiles and sent me down   the wonderful journey of textile explorations.

I came across this wonderful interview with one of NUNO's founders- Junichi Arai- a living textile legend! Open the link to check out the video.

 

NUNO

      

NUNO  is the simplest Japanese term for fabric. It is a company founded in 1984 by designers Reiko Sudo and Junichi Arai, run by Reiko Sudo since 1987. Nuno Corporation creates innovative textiles combining traditional aesthetics like- mud dyeing, salt shrinking, sashiko quilting, etc with the latest modern computer and synthetics technology. 

Textiles include polyester that has been sprayed with stainless steel in an automobile factory to Okinawan banana fiber coated fabrics. The fabrics are featured in collections of design museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art, and Victoria & Albert. They have a retail store in Tokyo and sell some of their products at the MoMa store in NY. 

Nuno has another brand NunoWorks which has bold designs made using a combination of heritage techniques.

Nuno is close to my heart as it's where it all began for me... My first job out of college, I was lucky to work with them for 5 years in NY!