Dyeing with fresh indigo

Photos: Alice Bernardo and Mafalda Pacheco;

This spring, in Serralves farm we started a small dyer's garden, with the purpose of having a few live varieties to show and maybe use in the workshops and experiments. This year the garden was really small, we didn't have much time to dedicate to this part of the project, but we managed to grow a few interesting plants, like japanese indigo, woad and a few others.

The amount of indigo we grew was not enough to do anything, so I was just aiming at collecting the seeds to use next year, as indigo seeds are known for being short-lived. But then I started planning the Natural Dyeing workshop that happened last weekend with Guida, and when talking about the indigo plants with her I remembered having seen several methods for dyeing with fresh indigo leaves, instead of having to start a indigo vat.
And having these plants growing right there, it would be a shame not doing any experiments with it. After all, it was actually the first time we had real indigo plants at hand.

Doing a quick research through several methods, I ended up following Roland Ricketts method, that can be found here.
His fresh leaves dyeing method is actually quite simple. It consists in picking fresh leaves, blending them with very cold water, straining this fluid to a clean container and using it as a dye bath, submerging the protein based fibers for a few minutes before exposing to the air and rinsing.

The shades of blue we got are absolutely beautiful and being able to dye our fibers blue, which is such a difficult color to obtain through natural dyeing, using such a simple method and the plants we grew in Serralves, was amazing!