What better way to end the summer than to learn how to use indigo for dyeing!
It was a damp grey day at the end of August, but it wasn't raining yet when I arrived at Farnham Museum and their lovely garden room, to learn more about natural dyeing with indigo.
The workshop was run by Ginny Farquhar and Sam Jones and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Woad
We started by learning a bit of the history of indigo and the fact that there are quite a few plants around the world that produce blue dye. Then we went outside into the museum garden to meet the plants we'd be working with - namely Woad and Japanese Indigo.
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| Two types of Japanese Indigo |
Here we picked some of the leaves of both and Ginny and Sam showed us how to get colour from the plants straight away without a vat. While not as intense as the colours we'd be using later, they were still a very beautiful blue.
They then showed us how to set up a vat for dyeing. Vats require 3 things. A source of indigo, something to create an alkaline environment and something to remove the oxygen from the mix. The last thing you need is patience. You need time to leave the vat to settle. Then when you start dyeing you need time for your fabric to oxidise between dipping - more dips gives you a deeper colour. This is not a fast process, but it is very satisfying.
After lunch we learnt how to do shibori to make patterns on our fabric before starting to dye them. Using a selection of glass beads, threads, rubber bands and clips we were able to create different patterns as the indigo only sits on top of the fabric, rather than being absorbed into it.
This was great fun and with a bit more experience you'd be able to have a fair idea of the outcome I think.
We each had three cotton squares to work with, which each needed two dips into the vat, with time to oxidise between.
While we did this Ginny was dipping sample squares to show the build up of colour and how intense it gets. By the end of the day we all had a sample sheet showing all the different colours we'd achieved.
We also had the option to dip some of our own material if we'd bought any along. My neighbour June had been having a sort out earlier in the year and gave me some silk, which I'd bought along. So one piece went into the indigo vat scrunched up to create a cloud pattern which I adore and the other two went into the woad vat to see what would happen. They came out a really beautiful pale blue, although I do wish I'd been able to use the vat earlier when it was making a more purple colour.
But that's the point of natural dyeing. You never know what you might end up with. You can do everything the very same, but if you do things at differnt times in the season, the plants will act in a different way. The fact we had a very dry summer probably has something to do with the colours we got too.
I very much enjoyed this workshop. Ginny and Sam were so generous with their knowledge. I really want to know more about natural dyeing in general and following on from the Eco Print course I'm thinking about where in the garden I can include more dyeing plants.
