Mission
Our Story
Founder
What is Shibori?
Slow Fiber Studios

MISSION

WSN celebrates tradition while fostering innovation. Our main objective is to unite members from the textile community – practitioners, scholars and businesspeople – for a productive exchange of information and inspiration. We hope to preserve traditional practices while also promoting new creative developments and contemporary adaptations.
The World Shibori Network (WSN) was founded in 1992 in Nagoya, Japan, as a grass roots organization dedicated to the preservation of Japanese shibori and similar traditional techniques across the globe.

OUR STORY

It comes from the Japanese verb root shiboru, “to wring, squeeze, press.” The closest translation would be “shaped-resist dyeing.” The shaping process reserves areas that are recorded as patterns with characteristically soft edges and crinkled textures when cloth is dyed. Rather than treating cloth as a two-dimensional flat surface, shibori techniques give it a three-dimensional form by folding, crumpling, stitching, plaiting, or plucking and twisting.

Cloth may be drawn up and bound, stitched and gathered, pleated and bound, folded and clamped between boards, or wrapped around a pole then pushed along it to compress the fabric into folds. Further, a cloth may be dyed repeatedly using a different shaping method each time.

FOUNDER

Slow Fiber Studios is founded on a simple intention: to offer real-world insight into the multifaceted and holistic practice of textile-making. A program of World Shibori Network, affiliated with NaturalDyeWorkshop.com and shop.slowfiberstudios.com, Slow Fiber Studios™ offers a forum to present lectures, demonstrations and dynamic, hands-on workshops by master artisans, artists, scholars, and specialists from diverse areas of the world where textile culture runs deep — Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, Mexico, and the UK. 

We are committed to providing authentic information, reciprocal dialogs, networking and building a community of like-minded people. We believe the best way to understand a philosophy is to see it being lived. Slow Fiber Studios™ gets to the heart of ‘the making of things’.

WHAT IS SHIBORI?

The World Shibori Network (WSN) was founded in 1992 in Nagoya, Japan, as a grass roots organization dedicated to the preservation of Japanese shibori and similar traditional techniques across the globe.

SLOW FIBER STUDIOS

Slow Fiber Studios is founded on a simple intention: to offer real-world insight into the multifaceted and holistic practice of textile-making. A program of World Shibori Network, affiliated with NaturalDyeWorkshop.com and shop.slowfiberstudios.com, Slow Fiber Studios™ offers a forum to present lectures, demonstrations and dynamic, hands-on workshops by master artisans, artists, scholars, and specialists from diverse areas of the world where textile culture runs deep — Brazil, China, France, India, Japan, Mexico, and the UK. 

We are committed to providing authentic information, reciprocal dialogs, networking and building a community of like-minded people. We believe the best way to understand a philosophy is to see it being lived. Slow Fiber Studios™ gets to the heart of ‘the making of things’.