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. 

dyeing for some creativity

on the last night of my vacation, i went to a shibori/tie-dye dyeing session with my local creative group. i took some odds and ends of cloth. most of it from the fabric we used at sabin's confirmation in 2014, which was a bit stained by food and wine. now you can't see any of those stains. the piece on the left was a remnant of white linen. i put it in the second round of the dye bath, so it came out lighter, but still cool.

i played with shibori techniques - folding in triangles and using cardboard and plastic as resists, as well as putting a ton of small rubber bands on one piece. i wish it was indigo, but it was navy blue batik dye. i really love how it turned out. i brought them home and washed them. the smaller piece is one of the fabric bags my sister made for wrapping everyone's christmas presents a couple of years ago. 

i've been saving husband's old shirts to make a quilt for some years now and i think they would look great with these bits and pieces, since most of them are shades of blue. and i already pinned about 50 inspiration pins for the next time we have a dye evening. i think it would be great to work with some natural dyes the next time, rather than commercial batik dyes. 

these are a couple more of the linen bags my sister made. i used the second round of some red dye that the others had used - i really love this salmon color that came out of the pot. this is giving me so many ideas, i definitely want to do some more. and the next time we do an indigo pot down at the museum, i'll definitely be taking some cloth along. i feel like being on vacation opened up my creativity again. now, to try to hold onto it and keep it going.