You Can’t Resist Woven Shibori

If you’re familiar with dyeing, you’ve probably heard the term “shibori” before. If not, shibori is a type of resist-dyeing technique developed in Japan. If you’ve seen the Fall 2023 issue of Easy Weaving with Little Looms, you might have noticed one of the projects is a woven-shibori scarf—but what is woven shibori compared to just regular shibori?

In traditional shibori, cloth is wrapped around objects, folded, pleated, and otherwise strategically tied up before dyeing to create patterning on the cloth. What makes something woven shibori is that the pull strings used to create pleats and tie up the cloth are woven into the fabric itself.

For her Frosty Ice-Dyed Scarves, Rebecca Fox wove one in regular plain weave and one with these drawstrings. Rather than weave them in along with the rest of the weft, Rebecca chose to use a pick-up stick and string heddles to strategically create 2 different shibori sheds. She also strategically created some of the weft loops of the shibori thread while weaving the fabric to aid in tying the threads after pulling them and pleating the fabric. Once the fabric was dyed, the shibori threads were carefully trimmed.

Rebecca's woven-shibori scarf.

So why make the effort of creating new sheds and carefully weaving in shibori threads instead of just pleating and tying the fabric off the loom? I can think of a few reasons some weavers might prefer this technique. First, it allows you to better control the shibori. By weaving them into the fabric, you’re locking the pull threads in place, and they can’t slip and slide around. You can make your pleats and areas of resist as evenly spaced as you want.

Also, how you weave the pull threads into the fabric can control how the fabric will pleat. Rather than having to pleat by hand, you can pull a thread and have the hard work done for you. If you have trouble with hand mobility, this can make the act of shibori much easier—the only fine motor work required is tying knots.

There’s a whole world of woven shibori out there, and I encourage you to explore it! If you want a starting point, definitely check out our Fall 2023 issue with Rebecca’s project as well as her article about ice dyeing. (It’s much easier than you might think!)

Happy Weaving!
Christina