Journal
Dyeing a silk camisole with fresh indigo leaves
Last month, heading clockwise around Killearn's Open Gardens I met a friend who was going anti-clockwise.
We stood and chatted on the pavement, about gardens and textiles and how she had grown indigo last year but hadn't done anything with it. It seemed complicated to build a vat and, by the time she had done the reading and got all the bits together, the frost had come and her indigo plants were mushed and spoiled.
She had decided to give it a miss this year.
I have a lot of indigo growing in the garden and poly tunnel - it was much easier than I had anticipated and all the seedlings germinated and grew happily.
I know that if I decide to process them into a vat I will dither and lose time and then head off on holiday knowing that there is a high chance of frost while we are away.
So instead I have been buying up pre-loved silk camisoles, scarves and blouses and using the salt rub method to turn them into clothes fit for a mermaid.
I'm sharing a step by step tutorial here on how to dye a silk camisole with fresh leaf indigo.
I took a lot of what I do here from this video of a Japanese woman dyeing a silk scarf with indigo.
Other excellent online resources are produced by Liz Spencer The Dogwood Dyer.
Harvesting dyer's chamomile from the dye garden
As I walk down to the Studio in the morning the grass is wet, the sweet scent of damp earth hovers between the hedges, small orange brackets fungi sprout from the sides of the raised beds.
The apples on the feral apple trees that surround The Studio are red and ripening.
These trees, carefully chosen heritage varieties, were planted the month we moved in and immediately eaten to the ground by the deer who live by the river. Then, a decade later, they rose out of the sprawling brambles, mature trees nursemaided back to health by prickly stems that kept the deer away.
Yet another example of how the natural world works so much better without my interference.
The flowers in the dye garden catch the tune of harvest time and all open at once - dyer's chamomile, french marigolds, sulphur cosmos, dahlias, tansy - every day there are new flowers to pick and preserve.
How to create colour with fresh leaf indigo
This year I have been growing indigo in my garden and in an upcycled polystyrene fish box in the greenhouse.
Indigo refers to a number of plants and the actual variety that I am growing is called Persicaria tinctorial or Japanese indigo. It is a tender perennial and will not survive the frost. Here in the middle of Scotland we have frosts up until the middle of May so I am growing indigo as a half hardy annual - exactly the same way that I grow amaranthus or cosmos.
I started by sowing seeds in February and March - using a heated mat to germinate them and then growing them on in the greenhouse, covering them with fleece on cold nights. They went out into the garden in May and I began cropping last week.
The amount of indigo that I am growing is relatively small and a lot of leaves are needed to create pigment, so, rather than make a vat, I have decided to use the fresh leaves, along with salt, to colour fabric.
You can see how I get on and learn more about the technique in this Studio Vlog
Natural Dyes: Fig leaves
The scent of warm fig leaves is one of my favourites.
It could be a hot day, sun baking down into a courtyard of figs growing in a climate where they are at home.
It could be simmering leaves in cream to make fig leaf ice cream in my kitchen.
It also turns out that it could be dyeing soft woolly yarns in the Studio.
The leaves that I used for this were what I had about - very much end of season, slightly yellowing, certainly not in their prime.
The colours are beautifully gentle but also deep and the scent in The Studio . . . . . just bliss.
Natural Dyes: Dyeing wool with Plum bark
Next to the airstream caravan is an orchard of plum trees. It is a small orchard, there are only five trees, but it is a beautiful space, especially in the spring with white narcissi and snakehead fritillaries flowering under plum blossom.
Four or five years ago there was a bumper crop of plums, far more than I could pick, and the birds feasted, dropping the stones on the ground. There must have been some animal gossiping about the bounty available for a red squirrel arrived and spent her days in the tree tops picking out the best, throwing the rest to the ground.
The result has been a thicket of saplings, joining the suckers that huddle at the bases of the trees to provide perfect material for the dye pot.
I simply had to chop them up into pieces, soak for a few days, and then simmer gently to get beautiful colours.
Plum is a dye which will give different colours depending on the pH of the original dye pot so it is great if you want four colours from a single collection of dye material.
In the photo the yellow and the pale green are from pH neutral dye extraction. The orange and dark grey are from pH alkali extraction.
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