Industrial Production and the Hand Process: Making a Bridge

Authors

• Catharine EllisFollow

Date of this Version

9-2008

Document Type

Article

Citation

Textiles as Cultural Expressions: Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Symposium of the Textile Society of America, September 24–27, 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii

Comments

Copyright 2008 by the author.

Abstract

I am a weaver, a dyer, an artist, and an educator. I speak to you today from the perspective of a maker because it is from the process of making that I have researched and learned what I know about taiten shibori.

My own work has been defined for the last number of years by an original process that I call woven shibori. The genesis of that process was the introduction to stitched or nui shibori. As I made hand stitches into a piece of cloth in preparation for making a resist for dyeing, I realized that a weaver has the ability to place those stitches into the cloth during the construction. Weaving is a more efficient process than hand stitching and one that utilizes the woven structure to develop a somewhat controlled vocabulary of patterned resist in the cloth. When constructing a woven shibori, a supplemental warp or weft thread is woven on a ground cloth. That supplemental thread usually follows a structured pattern and is then used to gather the cloth, either in a warp of weft direction to form a resist for dying, shaping, burning, or other process.

This exploration has challenged all that I know about weaving: it has led me to explore and refine my knowledge of woven structure, dyeing, materials, and process focusing always on that relationship to the woven shibori process. I have developed an extensive vocabulary of woven pattern resist and alternative applications of the process and I have combined materials in ways that would only be possible for a hand weaver.