Eric the half a bee is now a whole bee and even more recently has taken up his destiny on the back of a robe. All this will make more sense when I write the first half of this post about the shibori and dyeing. I’m writing it backwards ’cause I’m all excited about the finished product:
From the front:
When starting to design things for our last indigo dyeing day, I definitely wanted to have another try at stitched resist. I decided to do a bee after learning that one could do a folded shibori that delivered hexagons, reminiscent of course of honeycomb. I also watched some youtube videos on stitched shibori and learned that it is often done folded in half. Hence half a bee was the thing. I was thoroughly amused.
My hexagons didn’t come out quite the way I wanted. I’m apparently too good at preparing fabric to resist dye. Part of this is that I think I’ve been too ambitious in the amount of fabric per parcel. So I thought I’d emphasise the hexagons on one of the pockets:
I’m utterly delighted in how well Eric himself came out:
There was a lot of slight redesign in the process of making up the robe. One of these was having made the neck cutout too small, so the first time I tried it on it didn’t sit at all well. After some minor panic late at night and some slow thinking, I figured out that I needed to unpick the neck band, increase the neck opening, extend the neckband and reassemble. Which worked just fine to fix the problem. Whew.
The robe has pockets, belt loops, a hanging loop and a deep facing across the shoulders from shoulder blade to below bust. The latter for warmth, structure, longevity and support of the precious bee design.
Here it is being modeled:
Montjoye Makkinstuff 