Using dried and frozen Japanese indigo leaves for dye

 

Last year at the end of the gardening season, before the first frost killed off my Japanese indigo crop, I harvested a bunch of stalks to save. I hung some to dry; I took the leaves off of some, bagged the leaves in a freezer ziplock, and stuck them in the freezer; and I took the leaves off of some, laid them out on a flat pan, put the pan in the freezer, and left them to not only freeze, but to dry out (freeze-dry).

  

About a month ago, I tried brewing up a Japanese indigo dye pot in the usual manner (like I would for fresh leaves), but I used some of the freeze-dried leaves. It didn't work out. I meant to toss all of my frozen and dried leaves but couldn't quite bring myself to do it.

 

I'm glad I didn't because I just came across the book, A Garden to Dye For, by Chris McLaughlin. In it there is a recipe for using dried Japanese indigo leaves in an ice-water preparation to dye silk. Yippee! Of course I tried it right away.

 

The recipe calls for 4 ounces of J. indigo leaves, half air-dried, half microwave-dried. These are blended up with ice-water in a blender, the mixture is strained through a cloth (like a flour sack towel) and a strainer, and then the pre-wetted silk is placed in the thick mixture for 10-20 minutes. This is supposed to yield a light, turquoise-like blue on the silk. I didn't have any microwave-dried leaves, but I used all of the dried and frozen leaves I did have on hand. They totaled about 3.5 ounces.

 

The author of the book left her silk scarf in the liquid for 40 minutes. I didn't have any scarves, but I have lots of silk hankies, so I used some of those. Although I did see the blue color on the hankies at about 10 minutes, I left them in for 40 minutes. I also tossed in a small knitted swatch of wool I had on hand. After soaking, the silk should be rinsed and left hanging to dry.

 

I rinsed my hankies, and although I caught glimpses of that pretty turquoise for a moment, what I ended up with in the end was green. I don't know if that's because I left the hankies soaking for too long, because of the chemistry of my water (well water, run through a softener), or because some of my leaves were frozen, but not dried. The color is pretty, nonetheless.

 

Here are the hankies soaking in the thick liquid:  

 

And here they are after drying overnight. The turquoise ones on top are some hankies that were dyed in an actual J. indigo dyebath last summer. The little woolen swatch is to the right of those hankies, and the green hankies from last night's experiment are below those:

 

 

 

It's a nice color, especially on shiny silk, but not the pretty turquoise I was hoping for. I've used up all of my leaves from last year now, but fear not! I have another crop growing in the dye garden as we speak. I will, of course, repeat the experiment again in hopes of attaining that wonderful turquoise in the future from dried J. indigo leaves.

Dyeing with Japanese indigo

I've been growing Japanese indigo plants in my garden this year. This is the first time and I've been very nervous about it. We've had drought conditions here, like much of the U.S., and these plants like to be kept moist. I ordered my seeds here, and started them indoors about six weeks before planting them outside in the spring. They've been doing relatively well and it was finally time for my first leaf harvest.

I have about fourteen plants. You can harvest about 1/3 of the leaves from a plant every couple of weeks once they're ready (around midsummer). My husband helped me and between us we gathered right around 16 ounces of leaves.

I rinsed them and put them in my smaller dye pot:

I covered them with hot tap water and them placed the smaller pot inside my larger pot, which had water in it, so that the smaller pot was in a water bath. I slowly heated the leaf/water mix up to around 160 degrees F and kept it there for about two hours:

After straining the leaves out, I added about 1 1/2 tbs. baking soda and then poured the dye bath back and forth for about five minutes. It turned a nice, deep blue color:

But it wasn't ready to dye with yet! Now I added a reducing agent, which takes the oxygen out of the dyebath. I had one ounce of thiourea dioxide on hand for the occasion. I added about 1 1/2 tbs to the dyebath and waited for about 15 minutes. The deep blue is supposed to become light yellowish, but nothing happened. I added the rest of my reducing agent (about the same amount as before), waited, and still nothing happened. I remembered that I had a package of color run remover with my laundry stuff. That's also a reducing agent, so I added about half to my dyebath and presto! It began to change color!

While this was happening, I had been soaking my handspun yarn in hot water, waiting for the dyebath to be ready to take it. The yarn needs no mordant for indigo, but it should be wet. Here are some of the skeins I had on hand to dye. On the left is polwarth wool, the middle is superwash Bluefaced Leicester, and on the right is a BFL/silk blend. The roving at the top is babydoll southdown, but it didn't go into the dyepot this time:

I forgot to take a picture of the dyebath after the reducing agent was added, but you can see the color of the dyebath in the liquid at the bottom of the bowl in the picture below. These are the three skeins from the picture above right after being plucked out of the dyebath after a 20 minute soak. They are light, yellowish-green at first, but when they hit the air, they start to turn blue right before your eyes:

I squeezed the excess liquid out and laid them out to air and watched them turn darker blue. I ended up dyeing a few more skeins and some roving before the dye started to become exhausted. In all I dyed 8 ounces of polwarth yarn, 8 ounces of superwash BFL yarn, 4 ounces of BFL/silk yarn along with 4 ounces of BFL/silk roving, and one 4-ounce ball of baby alpaca yarn - all with my 16 ounces of Japanese indigo leaves:

I'm so happy that my Japanese indigo was a success! And I can repeat the whole process every two weeks until the growing season is over!

Now I have my fingers crossed that my flax experiment will also meet with similar success- more on that at a later date...