Carol Lee Shanks adds texture and shape to the simplest garments with just a twist.

A lot of clothing spends its useful life in an endless seesaw of being carefully ironed, and then getting inevitably wrinkled. But what if you regarded wrinkles on your clothes as a plus? You’d probably discover, as I have, that a few scattered wrinkles look messy, but lots of wrinkles look fascinating. Intentionally wrinkling garments adds texture. You can control the direction and density of wrinkled textures, add patterns with a few folds, and reshape an entire garment with just a simple twist of damp, natural-fiber fabric.

Because you’re relying on a natural, somewhat random process to accomplish all this, you have to be prepared for some surprises. Each time you twist a garment, the texture you create will be slightly different. In other words, the pleasure of creating new textures is repeated every time you wash your garment-and you can choose to form the wrinkles differently each time as well.

From Threads #58