Another excellent thing about Kim is, between her and Dan, they have everything. You need a scale to weigh slaked calcium hydroxide in grams? She has it. Need a second propane tank for another vat? In the garage. You want to use marbles in a shibori technique? Yep, hold on just a sec. Clamps—you want clamps? Which type?

It makes some dye days easy breezy. Others, like yesterday, were frustrating, but not because of lack of materials. After four hours of translating recipes from Spanish and monkeying around with the chemistry of our vats—another attempt at Michel Garcia’s 1-2-3 method; the other one with lye (sodium hydroxide)—we got our hands really, deeply blue. Looming Jane does a nice job describing our Garcia bio-vat approach.

To dye her kuno shibori, Kim stitched in marbles and two types of dried beans. Here’s a great how-to article in Seamwork featuring shibori techniques you might want to try. Using tablecloths, I was going for graphic patterns on a big scale.