indigo dye pot

this indigo dying is another of those things that i never did until i learned to do it in danish, so i don't actually know what this is called. in danish it's a kypefarve. from what i can find online, it's called a starter solution - and it involves lye and powdered indigo and needs a few days to "marinate" before using it. 

you bring the water up to between 50-55°C and then gently add the starter solution. then a kind of shiny, iridescent surface forms. and then you can start dyeing.

we started off with some of the lovely mohair yarn we got from our recent visit to a mohair goat farm on fyn. 

we included a little bag of curly mohair locks. 

you can see some of the magic happening in this shot - it's a lovely green when you lift it out of the water and as it reacts with the air, it gets more and more blue. i absolutely love the alchemy of it and it's so magical that it comes from a plant!

this is my indigo bed. we didn't use fresh indigo for this. i want to learn to extract and make the indigo powder out of my fresh indigo. you can see what i did with the fresh stuff last year - here and here.

i also had some white linen napkins that i bought and they went into the pot as well - here you can really see the green color they have before the air does its magic. 

this is how the mohair yarn turned out. we could probably have left it in the pot longer and gotten an even darker blue, but i think this is just lovely!

and here's how the mohair locks turned out. we'll use all this yarn and such in our weaving projects at the museum. i have one more project to show in one last post, so stay tuned for more goodness from the indigo pot. 

linen dress in the indigo dye pot

i got this white linen dress on sale at cos last year. i've been waiting for the chance to dip it in an indigo dye pot for nearly a year! well, i got the chance last weekend! so i did a bit of prep on it with some fun shibori techniques. i put marbles inside and tied them with rubberbands. 

 my plan is to dip only part of the dress in the indigo and leave part of it white. 

and this is how i dipped it. i love the magic of indigo. it looks so green until it hits the air and then it magically turns blue (more about the indigo pot in my next post). 

how the marble bundles turned out - i love it! i'm really pleased with how it turned out.

i feel like i dipped it just the right amount. and i'm happy we've had a few warm days of indian summer, so that i could wear it in the past week.

and the back. maybe i could have dipped it a little bit more in the back. it has a belt too that i also dipped, but strangely, i failed to photograph that. i want to do lots of more of this!

experiments in fresh indigo - part 2

i still had a lot of indigo growing in the garden, so i decided to conduct another experiment dyeing with fresh indigo. i'd read about another method, where you blitz the leaves up in a blender with ice water, so i wanted to try that.

i had a piece of fine, very light cotton and i painted it with soy milk doodles, hoping to get a different color in spots. then i poured the indigo ice water mixture over it and massaged it in and let it sit for maybe half an hour (i really should have noted my timings a bit better).

it didn't feel like enough to just dye one piece of cotton, so i got out the silk i had dyed down in randbøldal and over-dyed it with the indigo ice water bath. 

it had a very cool effect with the regular indigo and the fresh. tonally, they are totally complementary, but they give very different shades of blue green. lovely.

it was a bit hard to rinse off the bits of the leaves, so i just hung them up to dry so that i could shake it off. i even over-dyed the one i had dyed with the salt dye mixture because it had ended up quite a light color when it was dry. 

i had found a nice piece of woven silk that i dyed as well - it has come out much more green. i don't know what i'll do with it, maybe make a top? i haven't decided yet. the dyeing is the fun part. and i stuck all my indigo stems in water and they surprisingly quickly sprouted roots, so i'm going to have even more next year!

and i planted them in the bed next door to the first bed of indigo. we'll have a blue summer next year if they take off. we have some unseasonably warm temperatures, thanks to the tail-end of the hurricanes on the east coast of the US, so i hope they have a chance to take hold.

experiments in fresh indigo - part 1

i bought some indigo seeds in the spring and planted them in pots in the greenhouse. once they were big enough and the frost gone, i planted them out in a raised bed. they looked a bit weak and scrappy and i wasn't sure whether they would turn out. but they took hold and became big, lovely, lush plants, taking over the bed, even though i had only planted them in one half. 

i read about people dyeing with fresh indigo (regular indigo dyeing is a fermentation process and seemed daunting) and decided to take some with me down to the little museum in randbøldal, where i weave. we had a regular indigo dye pot simmering that day, but i took the fresh leaves and some salt and decided to try the salt method on some silk i had found.

i massaged the salt into the leaves and then put in the piece of silk, which i'd prepared shibori-style with some small knots made with rubber bands. i massaged the leaf and salt mixture into the silk and let it sit.

i think i gave it about half an hour. it turned a lovely light aqua blue color. it took the leaves with quite some variation, with some spots darker than others. unexpected and lovely.

it's the perfect length for a scarf and i gave it a dip in vinegar water to set the dye and then took out the rubber bands. they had produced a lovely pattern, together with the salted indigo leaves.

it created a lovely play of colors on the silk and i found myself wishing i had more. it had been the last of the bolt at the fabric store, so i only had a small piece. i had divided it into three scarf-lengths and i put the other two in the regular indigo dye pot. that yielded a darker blue, as you can see here below.

i've sewn the ends together and made it into an infinity scarf that wraps twice around and has a lovely drape. i'll have to share a picture of it another day, as it's grey and rainy today and not light enough to take photos. it definitely won't be my last experiment in dyeing with fresh indigo. i think next year, i'll actually try to make some regular indigo dye to use, going through the whole fermentation and drying process. it's really a magical plant and it seems to do well in our climate. 

naturally-dyed easter eggs

nettles (learned that they don't work), beets, turmeric, red cabbage + vinegar, red cabbage without vinegar

beets, turmeric, red cabbage + vinegar, red cabbage without vinegar. two eggs fit in each honey jar.

the dark blue is the result of the red cabbage without vinegar

the marbled look was produced by bubbles that appeared to be created by the vinegar in the dyes, as there were no bubbles in the jar without vinegar.

i made some easter eggs with natural dyes. i used the advice from here, despite the fact that one of the tags on that blog is about potty training. no potties were trained during the making of these eggs. i used stuff i had in my kitchen - red cabbage, beets, turmeric and i even tried some nettles (they don't work). i love the colors they turned out to be. the eggs were provided by our chickens. they're good that way. and while their eggs aren't white, they're a very light tan, so they color very nicely.