Shibori and Indigo

So I have been totally hankering to dye with indigo for a while now, and finally finally did it!  I got the Jacquard kit and it is really easy and seems to last indefinitely about two weeks and a lot of items dyed.  

 We wrapped, folded, twisted

 glued, dipped, swirled...

 and came up with a ton of beautiful linens and shirts!

 My kids just couldn't wrap their head around only using blue, when clearly tie-dye has so many more color options, so I also grabbed a tie-dye kit for them to work on, so we had a very colorful textile based play-date.

The fall-out is that there are no safe whites in the house any more.  I found one more shirt, this was done with the blue gel elmer's glue as a resist then dip dyed.

I was washing sheets yesterday and started eye-ing them as well, but haven't got the guts just yet to do something that dramatic (after using the vat of dye a lot already!), but maybe a few pillowcases....

 Scooter posing with my beautiful dropcloth... some Pollack printing, tie-dying, shibori and house painting make for a work of art in itself!

 Update:  I did pull together a few pillow cases from the fabric I dyed... I love adding them to the bed!
also, just some notes on this process.  Believe in the resist.  The first batch (biggest by far), V and I were a little nervous, as they looked SOOOO dark, and it was so much fun, we basically dipped fairly quickly (20-30 seconds) and after rinsing and everything, I think they definitely could do with some more dye.  The dark pillow on the bed was left in for about 5 minutes and then dried angiven 5 more min, plus I really worked the dye into the fabric as much as I could (that one with the polka dots as well).  and I love the color even more!

AAAnd I found my shea butter soap recipe so am putting it here so I hope not to loose it again!  I made my first batch this year today...

I did it with the red palm oil from TJs and misread the recipe and put in a bit too much of the palm oil... I did try to fish some out, but it was mostly all melted and mixed, so instead of 12 oz, I probably had at least 17... I dialed the olive oil back since it was the last oil I added, but we'll see if it works out.  Since it was so orangey, I made a citrus (Tangerine, Lemon, Orange, lemongrass) and cedar bar.

Next batch for this year, 9/21 was made with half sandalwood amyris with some avocado oil (topped with a little basil), and all of the bars in the heart and square molds are basil tangerine lime. I split one batch of the shea butter soap.