One of the things that lends indigo to so much use in my house, apart from my well documented love of all things blue, is that as a dye it can sort of picked up and put down. Let me explain, once you build a vat it can be put to bed when you are finished and revived later when you need to use it again and as long as you have clean / scoured fabric you are ready to go. This is particularly useful for just dyeing an item that needs some new life breathing into it. When dyeing other colours you need to scour and then mordant and then you can dye in a pot on the stove.
Let’s talk a little bit about freedom to experiment, when you invest a lot in beautiful fabrics, organic responsibly made that come at a higher price. It can lead to a tendency, for me, to rigidly hold to the rules of natural dyeing so that you get the best result; which mostly means even colour that is light safe and not bleeding. All these things are absolutely fine to strive for, and necessary if that is the end result you are looking for but it can be a bit anxiety inducing like a big white canvas that you don’t want to waste. What happens when you find yourself with two kingsized ripped fitted sheets that are just begging to be experimented with, is a lot of freedom with very little financial risk.
So the whole point of this experiment was to get variables. Variables of colour, pattern, texture and shade. I am using a ferrous vat which means it has a slightly wider spectrum of colour outcomes. (as the vat forms you can get pink/ purple/ green) This time I did long dips of scrunched fabric, then removed them oxidized, rinsed and repeated . They were broken down into small pieces about 4 and two very large ones. The size difference alone changed the outcome. ( top picture is small one below is a close up from a big piece)
I spend a lot of time looking at the sky and if I was going to try and find the feeling of sky in a dye vat, indigo is obviously the way to go . I had two particular ideas going into this dye experiment, one that is stitch dominant and one that is more about piecing . This is such a slow process as now we wait for the dye to cure before we can really move onto the next step .I will keep you posted.
I’ve taken two workshops on indigo dyeing and lived both of them. The first was sort of an introduction—we scrunched and dipped and the results were magical. But it was the second workshop on the art of Japanese rice paste resist dyeing where I fell in love. I had access to the materials and vat for several days and I experimented my little heart out. That experience boosted my confidence in my surface design capabilities.
So beautiful!!