Tie-dye is the perfect textile art for a hippy — colorful, messy, fast and chaotic, with a fabulous wow factor at the end when it all unfolds. Shibori is the perfect tie-dye art for a classics professor — disciplined, slow, intricate, often done in a subtle color palette, but when it all unfolds, the ‘wow!’ is all there.

Shibori artist Patricia Freiert has a show at the St. Peter Arts Center, her first-ever gallery show, and the gallery is luminous with her designs.

Freiert dyes fabric using the traditional Japanese shaped-resist techniques of shibori, shaping the fabric by binding, folding, stitching and wrapping. The resulting patterns are geometric, delicate, crisp and organic.

Semi-retired from teaching at Gustavus Adolphus College the past five years, she has been showing in regional and national shows, teaching workshops locally and nationally, and has been recognized with awards. Two of her scarves were purchased for the permanent collection of the Minnesota Historical Society (www.mnhs.org). In 2006 Freiert completed 84 pieces and sold about the same number.

In 2005 she completed her largest work to date, a project for Christ Chapel on the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College: two dozen 12-yard banners, pale blue on silvery silk organza, with a look of snowflakes, stars and beams of light streaming across many banners from the cross on the altar. It was a daunting technical challenge because of the scale of the building, and certainly a labor of love for the artist.

“I love that building,” said Freiert, who began teaching at the college in the 1970s. “What a thrill to become a part of the building, even if just for a moment.”

Freiert added a shibori studio to her home two years ago, furnishing it with traditional tatami mats, bamboo steps, shoji screens over the windows and a heavy-duty commercial restaurant cooker in the corner with a giant stockpot for the dying. Many projects require bringing the fabric to 180 degrees for an hour or more and regular kitchen equipment was just too slow to heat, Freiert said.

She has pigments in her studio made of natural minerals, shimmering glitters made from metallic micas from Japan in shades of gold, copper, silver and sumptuous tones in between. (“These are not good for you,” she warns. “You have to wear a dust mask. But they’re just gorgeous.”)

And she has pigments made from semi-precious stones in a soymilk base: the blue of lapis lazuli, green of malachite, rich red pipestone, turquoise. She also has regular commercial industrial dyes. “I’m not a purist,” she said. “I use what I need to get the effect I want.”

In addition to traditional silk. she works with experimental weaves designed for silk growers in Japan in which silk is combined with Mylar and coated with aluminum. She also enjoys mixing techniques from regions across Africa, India and China, which have been mixed and remixed throughout history. Recently she added a collection of tjaps to her tool kit, which are copper stamps used to apply wax in Indonesian batik. She uses them to apply adhesive to add stamped metallic accents to her shibori pieces.

Freiert and her husband, Will, both longtime classics professors at Gustavus Adolphus College, are apt to take the long view of her work. They both enjoyed the descriptions of how central textiles have been in human history in a recent light read for them both: “Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years.”

As a historian and classics professor, he appreciates the ancient tradition of textile work as the oldest human technology, predating even the earliest stone tools. As a husband, he is grateful she chose the airy beauty of silk over the equally historic but much weightier clay. “Whenever she’s in a show I help with the loading, hauling and setting up,” he said. If she was a potter, “My back would be broken.”

They have both added textile stories to their wide understanding of world history — he telling how the plaid of the Celts may have originated in the heart of the East and she explaining the all-American cowboy bandana gets its name from women in India tying strings around tiny puckers of fabric before dying the cloth to make little circles called bandana.

Centuries ago in Japan the techniques of shibori were used for decorating kimono fabric in long narrow lengths.

“This is the most labor-intensive surface design ever in the history of man,” Freiert said. “It is also the one that goes from the peasant class to the aristocracy.”