Janice Gunner - Shibori Work

Janice Gunner was my teacher for three days at PIQF this year. She was a terrific teacher, and I had a marvelous time working with her. One of her specialties, which she unfortunately didn't get to teach this time around, is Shibori. She creates her own hand-dyed indigo Shibori fabrics using stitched and wrapped resist techniques, and then uses them in exceptional wall quilts, sometimes by themselves; sometimes combined with vintage Japanese kimono fabrics.

She is the author of this book...

...and I hope, one day, to be able to explore some of the exciting techniques presented herein. A long-standing dream of mine is to turn one of our garages into a wet studio for the purpose of doing fabric dying and painting, and Shibori is definitely on my bucket list of techniques I want to learn.

One of the special exhibits at this year's show was a collection of Janice's Shibori pieces, and I'm going to devote an entire post to showing you her wonderful work.

African Odyssey II

Sea Study V

Detail of Quilting

    

Heat Wave (One Day In May!)

Detail of Quilting

Japan Studies  I - IV

The following four quilts are part of Janice's "Interactive" series. The backgrounds have been printed with conventional screen printing inks, which were then over printed with thermo-chromic (heat-sensitive) pigments that either intensify or disappear when heated. In your typical quilt show, touching the quilts is a sin punishable by severe reprimands from indignant "White Glove Ladies" (who are the only ones who can "legally" touch the quilts). With these particular quilts, though, viewers were, in fact, INVITED to touch the quilts, by resting their hands on certain areas of the quilts for 30 seconds and watch the results... It was quite amazing, and amusing!

Hot Spots

Blue Bamboo

X Marks the Spot

Poppies I

More quilts and One-Quilter exhibits coming soon...!