Toni Bouman

The world of textiles has been Toni’s lifelong passion and inspiration. She has worked with fabric and surface design since she was a child and began her career as a clothing designer. Toni quickly discovered, however that the world of mass produced clothing held little appeal for her.

The design world did provide a natural transition into a deep exploration of different ethic expressions of textile design processes which ultimately brought her to the study of Japanese Shibori.

Shibori is the method of manipulating and folding cloth and then, hand painting and dyeing on it. It involves repeated layering of dyes and sometimes removal and re-application of dyes. What Toni find so fascinating is that no two pieces are ever identical. Each piece is truly an original. Toni is especially drawn to working specifically with silk due to the lustrous quality of the fiber.

While the technique itself may seem simple, in actuality, years of color theory and the discovery of endless variations of patterns go into creating these amazing pieces, displaying a spectrum of colors that only silk can absorb and reflect from the dyes.