Tangled up in Blue with Carmen Bolanos

shibori sample made by Carmen Bolanos

We have been looking forward to this workshop, dyeing blue with Indigo and making designs with the Shibori techniques. Carmen Bolanos has been working with Indigo in El Salvador for a long time. What started as a pilotproject is now a structural way of living to a lot of people in El Salvador. She started to show us a big sample where she had made different designs with typical Shibori stitching as a resist. During the morning we all worked on our own sample.

dip in the indigo dyepot

After lunch the big play started. Again Carmen explained in a lovely mix of English-Dutch how to make designs, but this time using clamps, boards, pipes and many other things as a resist. It was just at the second day that she learned us how to make an indigovat by ourselves. Carmen has her own recipe for the vat, learned from the Japanese Indigo master. Her favourite is the one where you use fructose for reducing. It will take you some more time to use it, but it will give you a longer profit.

simple resist can give great results!

fabric dyed and designed by Marianne Hauser

fabrics of different students

The fabrics made on this day became bigger and bigger, we all get the hang of it and couldn't hardly stop At the end of the day Carmen showed us how to make a flowerpaste-resist and how to make a paint of indigo. Something to experiment with at home. All students went home with a bag full of indigo-dyed fabrics, enough to give their home and body a make-over!

my own small experiment with a flowerpaste-resist