My local surface design group met today and we played with soy wax and shibori. We have done both of these techniques separately but haven’t combined the two before.

We brought a bunch of different items to apply the soy wax to fabric and paper.

Bunny had everything set up for us, we turned on the electric skillet with the soy wax and it melted very quickly. So we were ready to go.

I had previously stitched a few pieces to shibori and Bunny had wrapped some pieces of silk on a pole ready to go. We applied soy wax to the shibori pieces and then added dye afterwards. We used Color Hue dyes which don’t require any sort of pre-treatment to the fabric and set almost immediately.

I had a bunch of pieces of fabric that had either been painted or dyed before. I added soy wax with a variety of tools.

And then added the Color Hue dyes.

Here you can see Bunny and Louise adding dye to their fabric that had already had the soy wax applied. I am now waiting for the fabric to dry and then I have to iron the wax out of all the pieces. So I will have to show you the results later. We had a good time and I think I made some pretty ugly fabric somewhat better. But I guess we’ll see!