Fresh Leaf Indigo Dyeing
This spring I planted Persicaria tinctoria indigo seeds from Blue Light Junction farm in the easement garden beds of our yard here in Denver. The first week of August, I researched the process, found a thrifted silk shirt to dye, and began what is often called the Salt process! I didn’t have a ton of plants, but just enough I thought, for dyeing one item.
It is a pretty straight forward process and while there are many variations, the following is the overview of how I dyed with the fresh leaves. Because there is a lot of scrunching and moving around of the fiber, wool isn’t recommended to use, and cotton doesn't take to the dye very much (without special mordants), so silk is the preferred fiber to use for fresh leaf dyeing.
I gathered my tools and set up a workspace, then harvested all the leaves I had grown. I washed them in ice cold water, then picked them off their stems. I soaked the stems in water so they could grow roots for replanting. The wet leaves came to 220 grams and I think my shirt weighed about 100 grams.
I then put these leaves in a big steel bowl with about 2 tsp. salt, my wetted silk shirt, s small scrap of cotton and began kneading the lot of it like a ball of dough. The three pictures inside the bowl are at 5, 10, and 20 minutes. I kneaded for 25 minutes the fibers with the leaves and sure enough the fiber started turning a beautiful turquoise. This color is so unique as you can’t achieve it with dried or powdered indigo pigment. Creating a vat with the dried pigment is the most common form of dyeing with the plant, and is a long process. After kneading for 25 minutes, I gently rinsed the leaves off the shirt and let it hang out of direct light. I washed in gently with soap after another day. When it was done and dry, I immediately saw that it would be perfect for my mother in law, who I am now staying with. She looks amazing in the blue hues and I am so glad to gift something unique to her, with the color from my garden.
In the second to last image, you can see the color difference from cotton scrap and the silk shirt. There are ways of treating cotton with protein milks (soy and cow) to ‘trick’ the indigo into latching on to the protein within those milks, that are embedded into the fibers. (So much to still learn!)
This was so fun and really a big deal for me as I had seen others growing a dye garden and dyeing with their indigo, and I was unsure if the plant would do ok in my climate (and my city dirt).
If my plants keep growing, I might be able to harvest another batch of leaves and dye another item. I am going to keep reading about other ways to use the leaves and methods of creating not just dyes, but dry pigments and other ways of capturing color for creative applications.