third grade shibori

Happy Mother's Day!

Shibori is the Japanese term for the dye-resist techniques of binding, clamping, or gathering cloth so that dye cannot reach certain parts. The result is a wonderful combination of carefully structured design with the organic freedom of the unpredictable. The third grade artists learned how to do a kumo (spider web) and tesuji (pleated) shibori technique. Why is shibori blue and how is the color and design related to Japan? Just ask one of our third grade artists!

I forgot to take photos of the process but it is very simple to do: we used white cotton fabric and waxed dental floss to tie the knots (I always love the look I get from the cashier when I buy 15 packages of dental floss at one time). I dye all of the pieces at once with indigo dye.

After spending a good part of our art time in making just 3-4 kumo shibori knots, I like to show them
a dvd that shows artisans creating shibori garments from start to finish. As we watch the kumo section, the kids ask me if the dvd is sped up because she ties so quickly! Her movements are so practiced she flows from one knot to the next. And soon we see a curl of hundreds of precisely bound knots in the fabric. We are impressed with the process!

This is another segment from the same dvd:


The third graders very carefully unfolded their kumo and tesuji shibori this week and were very impressed with the results! The tesuji was made to unfold into the perfect scarf for mother's day and they loved wrapping their art up for special gifts this weekend.

war weavings part 3

It was interesting to see how many of the third grade textile stories were related to war. Boys and girls created epic battle stories with ultimate destruction and rebirth, historical war references, or man versus some destructive element (robots, aliens, fires, etc).



Good versus evil is a part of any good storytelling, but I was struck by the number of stories dealing with death and destruction coming from my lovely third graders! I thought perhaps that this might be a way for some of them to process what they might be hearing or seeing on the news, in the media, etc. I thought of ways to relate these battle story weavings to the way another culture might retell their own battle stories in their textile art. While pondering these thoughts via a little googling, I found some interesting information. Athena is both the Greek goddess of war and weaving. Neith is the Egyptian goddess of war who wove all of existence with her loom. Or how about the Norse story of woman weaving on a warp of human guts and using arrows as a shuttle!



How amazing to think that this war and weaving relationship is so ingrained that it has become an intuitive part of human expression. These third grade war weaving stories are a primal retelling of our human story.

And one more connection to share, I found this video on the Penn Museum website featuring information about its show: Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan.

Notes from Afghanistan: War Rugs from Penn Museum on Vimeo.