Arashi Fabric using Three Poles

I've been taking a great online class, taught by Jane Dunnewold, called The Art of Cloth Dyeing,   through Craftsy http://www.craftsy.com/  .  I have both of her books and have thoroughly enjoyed them and refer to them often.  Wasn't even sure if I needed to take the class, but got it at half price for $25.00, which is far cheaper then going to one of the four day classes she teaches, especially when you add in lodging and travel expenses. Not saying I wouldn't love to go to one of those, but just don't have the dough. Having been a dyer for some time and teaching dyeing as well, most of the material is review for me, but have learned some new things here and there. I enjoy her teaching style and demeanor as well.

However, dyeing using more than one pvc pole was something completely new to me. When you want to dye a larger piece of fabric, wrapping it around one pvc pole, even a wide diameter one, there is still fabric that won't have contact with the dye.  This is a way to get the dye to reach all of the fabric. I didn't do it quite like Jane teaches in the class.  She immerses the poles into liquid dye with soda ash.  I like to presoak the fabric and squirting the dyes, so I can use multiple colors.

This fabric was ice-dyed first and had a lot of white, uninteresting areas.  It's about a yard. I pre-soaked the fabric in soda ash and let it line dry. Next,  I stitched three lines, using the largest stitch on my machine,  to create sleeves so I could insert three PVC poles, one into each.

Here are the poles through the fabric

This picture shows the fabric compressed on the poles.

I put them into a plastic lined garbage can lid and squirted diluted dye.  Then it was allowed to batch for 24 hours to give the dye time to attach to the fabric.

Here is the finished fabric.  It has some wonderful layers of textures, pattern, and colors as you can see in the closeup photos below.