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

  

Bluetiful Blue with Carmen Bolanos

Last weekend it was raining all saturday. If Carmen Bolanos wasn't visiting me I probably had been sitting down and doing nothing. But now we had a great day dyeing with indigo! I heated the woodburner at the workplace and nothing could stop us from working. Last time we were together we had a pH-issue. Carmen wanted to solve this problem so badly that she drove 2hours by train to test it again. She wants to get it perfect for the upcoming workshop at the 26th and 27th April, 2013. And after testing and re-viving the vat we got two perfect vats. One made with hydrosulfiet and one with fructose. It is realyy magic how the green change into blue! We have tested several kind of fabrics like wool, fauxfurcotton, silk, linen, cheescloth, nettleyarn and flaxgarn. We tried to make some Itayime and even an open weave as cheescloth it worked very nice. 

I know there are springholidays for most of the dutchies and maybe they will be abroad. But for those who wants to visit Europe and our beautifull country, this workshop at the 26th and 27th April 2013 could be a perfect combination for sightseeings and creatings. My atelier is located close to Amsterdam and there are lovely B&B in our countryside. The partners can go for a golfclinic at the golf-centre which is at a distance of 5 km. 

Vorige week zaterdag regende het de hele dag. Maar dat deerde ons niet. Carmen Bolanos had twee uur in de trein gezeten om de verfbaden met indigo weer tot leven te blazen. Bij een warm gestookte kachel stonden ze al klaar. De vorige keer in november 2012 kregen we de pH niet goed op orde. En nu met de methode die ze al jarenlang gebruikt lukte het wel. Carmen gebruikt indigo uit El Salvador, de beste die er is volgens haar japanse indigo-docent. We hebben diverse stoffen en garens geverfd van licht naar donker.  Het is iedere keer weer een wonder hoe het van groen naar blauw veranderd. De workshop zal hier plaatsvinden op 26 en 27 april as. Behalve hoe je een bad maakt, leer je ook allerlei handige tips hoe je zo'n bad controleert en weer nieuw leven in kunt blazen. Ook zal er geexperimenteerd worden met het maken van dessins in de Itayime-techniek. Voor informatie zie het tabblad hierboven.