Indigofera Tinctoria

posted by Helen

Yesterday I went over to Enys's house and she carefully pruned her nurtured and much cared for indigofera plant. Enys loves this plant; she says it is partly because it folds it's leaves up every night, but it is also because getting it to germinate proved challenging and growing it even with a greenhouse has been difficult. Now, however, she has got the hang of it and there are two other seedlings coming along nicely on her kitchen windowsill. It germinates in the greenhouse but seems happier in the kitchen and as she has an Aga the temperature probably stays fairly even. This is a plant that has been really looked after just as if it was baby which explains why she won't let me near it with her pruning shears and her DH ,an expert gardener, was drawn into a discussion on how much to cut off without endangering the plant.

The leaves weighed 100g, 76g after I had stripped them off the stalks. I ripped them up and put them in an 1 litre pot with a lid and placed them in a larger pan. I covered them with water and placing in a double boiler and heated till 60 degrees C

There was very little colour in the little vat so I left it overnight as a member from Natural Dyes Online had suggested. This morning ( Sunday) I had a look at it and it was still barely more than pale yellow so I chopped the leaves more finely and reheated in the double boiler and repeated to about 80 degrees C. The water was now murky yellow green , but I put 1 teaspoon of washing soda and had a pH of 9.8: too high I wonder whether the washing soda which is a new batch is unusually strong, and whisked till it was very frothy. The froth was quite white . By this time I was becoming convinced that there was no indigotin at all, but I added 1/2 teaspoon of thiourea dioxide to the vat and left it for ten minutes and put in a few strands of throwsters waste, which looked white as it went in rather than yellow. Now I was convinced that there was nothing there and was wondering how to tell Enys that her precious plant had produced nothing. when I pulled out the silk. To my astonishment the edge of the silk turned a turquoise blue. I tried re dipping and finally I got a pale blue silk and a pale turquoise blue 10 g piece of wool. I am a bit surprised how turquoise they look and felt the result has been more like the colour obtained by dyeing with persicaria (polygonum) tinctoria.

So there was not much indigotin there but some and I feel very pleased to have tried as I have now successfully used all the four plants that we grow and that will give blue. I wonder whether the lack of sun has been a factor but it is more probably that it is a tropical plant growing in conditions which are far from ideal for it. Well I will try again next year provided of course Enys lets me.

Garden bursting with dyes

This is the time of the year when I feel almost overwhelmed by the anount of dye in the garden. I have a sense of the dye garden exploding with colour. Dyers greenweed (genista tinctoria is bursting into flower, golden rod (solidago canadensis) is almost in full bloom, There is loads of yarrow ( achilleia miliefolium) and meadow sweet, the dyer's chamomile (anthemis tinctoria)is awash with golden flowers and the dyer knotweed polygonum inctoria and Chinese woad (isatis indogitica )in the new bed are doing really well. The colours are strong and vibrant too.

What is a poor dyer to do? Surprisingly enough during the year the yellows and greens are the colours I most often run out of, for example the green I made from overdying the yellow from dyers chamomile with indigo has already gone into making a bag , ( the one in the middle top). So this year, I thought I would dye a lot especially with the genista and with the golden rod as neither of these seem to give such a good colour after drying. I don't think that weld does either but it is such a strong dye I don't think we realise how much is lost. Sometime ago Kevin from the Online Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers generously sent me his method for making an extract from weld so I think I might try this. Then I found myself thinking maybe I would freeze some golden rod as our freezer is seriously underused. I wonder whether anyone has tried this I know Bettina http://woollybits.blogspot.com/ freezes dyers chamomile and India in EcoColour says she freezes a lot so I might try that.

Leena of http://riihivilla.blogspot.com/ I can't seem to be able to work out how to put a name into the blog which you click on and it goes to the site so Iam having to do it the long way round and give the url) has been dyeing with polygonum tinctoria and has used it to dye wool, rather than the silk I used and got a lovely soft blue with a turquoise cast. I think she kneaded the leaves more thoroughly as she seemed to get more dye than I did. She also pointed me to the turkey red website http://turkeyredjournal.com/ which had an article on dyeing with the japanese polygonum which said that the plant was ready when the leaves showed blue spots so maybe some of mine had been picked a little early.

Japanese Indigo Polygonum Tinctoria

I have just had a message from Enys to say that the Japanese Polygonum seeds have started to germinate. We were getting a bit worried as they were sown about two weeks ago and I had seen a report on the Natural Dyes Online that Japanese Polygonum seeds needed to be fresh and these were seeds saved form last year. I am really pleased as I would like to do more dyeing with these indigo bearing plants.

Walking round the garden today I saw that madder plants are appearing so is the goldenrod, and my Genista Tinctoria is in leaf. No woad has sprung up in my garden but Enys finds woad springing up all over the place in her garden and the other week I tried dyeing with a handful of woad leaves she brought round and got a pale greyish blue,