Yesterday, the Cotton & Indigo Trust gathered at Oyama Senmaida for summer gardening and our first dye harvest.
The indigo is thriving! The seedlings we planted have bushed out. The cotton has been attacked by insects and weeds, but there are a few flowers here and there.
It’s backbreaking work to maintain the fields, and after about 45 minutes, I had to stop. But I hobbled back out to get photos.
Before lunch we harvested two dozen plant, cutting the branches about 10 cm from the roots. It will grow back for another harvest in about a month.
In the afternoon, we made fresh leaf indigo dye. Unlike dried leaf and fermented dyes, fresh leaf dye creates a bright sky blue color on protein fibers; and a greenish color on plant fibers.
We worked with silk scarves as our dye blanks. As they soaked in room temperature water, we plucked the indigo leaves from the stems.
Making the dye was very easy. We simply blended the leaves with water. No additives at all, no heating. 1:1 ratio of leaves to WOF. We used:
75 g fresh leaf
4.5 L water
To fit the blenders, we ran three batches of 1.5 liters, straining the liquid through muslin into our dye bowl and returning the leaf to fresh water.
We submerged our scarves in the dye bath for 20 minutes, covering with a drop lid and giving it a few stirs along the way. Then we oxidised the color in the hot summer air for ten minutes.
Finally we mordanted the silk in a hydrogen peroxide bath (2cc to 4 liters of water) for about 20 minutes, then rinsed the scarves and dried them.
The results were lovely and I’m looking forward to our next meeting in September when we’ll be doing some spinning along with our gardening.
