Lockdown project 2021 - Shibori quilt
Summer 2021 marks the 10th anniversary of my love affair with Shibori.
It started on a short course at West Dean college near Chichester, a wonderful place to escape work and immerse yourself in craft in truly beautiful surroundings.
The course I took was 4 or 5 days learning Shibori, the inventive Japanese art of resist dyeing using indigo with the wonderful Janice Gunner. It was a real eye-opener for me, especially as I’d chosen to do it on something of a whim, there being no jewellery courses I wanted to do at the time. (I was a hobbyist jeweller for 17 years!)
As soon as I unpicked my first shibori piece after dyeing it in the indigo I was hooked!
My next step was going to Japan to learn Shibori and Katazome stencil dyeing with Bryan Whitehead at his beautiful silk farmhouse in the mountains outside Tokyo. The trip changed my life and set me on my path to becoming a Japanese textiles designer.
Over the last 10 years I have expanded my knowledge of Shibori and learned many traditional techniques, along with improvising and inventing my own forms (which is the really fun bit!)
This has led to the creation of quite a large stash of fabrics and has prompted to undertake a long held dream of making a Shibori quilt.
As there was such a variety, and many different sizes and shapes of fabric, I decided to go for a freestyle approach to creating the front of my quilt, selecting pieces that I felt sat well next to each other, juxtaposing the different shades of indigo blue and just basically having a lot of fun in the process!
The quilt grew in stages until it became king size, quite a bit of sewing time!
Of course, I then had to think about what to do for the back of the quilt! I’ve long been a fan of Sevenberry fabrics. Sevenberry is a modern Japanese brand that reproduces traditional patterns on cotton for quilting and other projects. I sourced my Sevenberry fabrics (and a couple of others) from Raystitch on the Essex Road in London, where I also teach Shibori classes.
I worked out a large block pattern in stripes, with 8 different fabrics, 6 stripes in a large square, one feature fabric square and one long strip (selected from two main fabrics).
Once the back was completed, came the very worst bit, the basting…
If you have ever made a quilt you will know that this is a real pain! You are working with two very large pieces of patchwork and batting (the filling for the quilt) and essentially have to make a sandwich where the outsides of the fabric match perfectly. The way I was taught was to start along the shorter edge and (using large safety pins) pin the layers together, trying to keep everything flat and matched up as you go. I typically pin the batting to the front first, then match the back to this, taking the safety pins out of the two layers and reapplying them through the three layers.
This took me 5-6 hours all told one day and, believe me, I had a couple of glasses of wine to celebrate when I was done!
The next bit is also really exciting, the actual quilting together of all the layers on the sewing machine. I always start form the middle and work my way to the edge. It’s physical work pushing an entire rolled up quilt through a domestic sewing machine and I always wear latex free rubber gloves as this helps you get a grip on the quilt.
I deliberately chose a very random wobbly line (crisscrossing in places) as I wanted the Shibori patterns to be the hero of the quilt, not this quilting stitches. I mostly used a navy blue thread but some variegated blue and white thread too.
This part took the better part of two weeks in bursts. It’s too tiring to do it all in a single day!
The next part was making my own bias binding to cover the raw edges of the quilt and bring it all together. This involved attaching bias strips to each other to make a single strip long enough to go around the outer edge of the whole quilt. I used vintage indigo dyed Japanese linen for this. The fabric originated from an old kimono and was picked up at my favourite vintage textiles shop, Morita Antiques, in Tokyo.
I then attached the bias binding to the quilt on the front using my sewing machine. There’s a clever way to do this which is to follow a good video tutorial on Youtube! Works every time. You need to trim the batting down before the next bit so that there’s a quantity of it extra to infill the bias binding making it look nice and plump.
The last stage was to laboriously hand stitch the binding to the back of the quilt, trapping the excess batting in between, two or three longish sessions in front of the telly!
Here’s the finished thing. I hope you like it and please leave comments!
The quilt will be on display at the Japanese Textiles and Craft Festival in London from 26-30 May 2021.
You can also watch a brief video walkthrough on my Instagram…
Feeling inspired? Want to make your own Shibori quilt? Then check out my online Shibori classes and classroom based teaching with indigo…