When you stir wool in the vat, do so gently. And wear gloves” if you don’t want your hands to turn blue. Hold it together until it’s under the bath, then open it up. When adding fiber or fabric to a dye vat, make sure it’s squeezed, Thayer advised, “because you don’t want to introduce air into the bath. But when fiber is pulled from the vat, the dyeing solution oxidizes as soon as it hits the air and becomes indigo blue again. This changes the substance to “indigo white.” The reducing agent thiorea dioxide (also called Thiox or thiourea dioxide) removes oxygen and changes indigo to indigo white-“which will adhere to material, but it’s not blue, it’s white!” Thayer said. Next, to make a dye that would adhere to fabric, the indigo solution was reduced by removing the oxygen from the pot. Four people poured the plant material and alkaline water from one bucket to another a few times to oxidize it. During the demonstration, she added baking soda to raise the pH, making the water alkaline so that indoxyl in the plant would dissolve and oxidize, becoming indigo. She had soaked the leaves in a bucket of water for about two hours. She did some dyeing with it, and the local people were amazed although they’d lived with the plant, they’d never seen it used.Īt the Fair, Thayer used Polygonum tinctorium from her home garden to demonstrate dyeing with indigo. There, Indigofera suffruticosa grew wild all over the island, even in cracks in the cement. Thayer went to a tiny island in the Caribbean many years ago, where indigo plantations had grown previously. False indigo (Baptisia australis) has the property of indigo but not as strongly as some other plants. Woad grows in the British Isles and was used to make faces blue in the movie Brave Heart, noted Thayer. Polygonum tinctorium (Japanese indigo or buckwheat, which can be grown in Maine and is edible).Nerium tinctorium (oleander) from India and the Far East.Lonchocarpus cyanescens from West Africa.Isatis tinctoria (woad) from Europe and Egypt.Indigofera suffruticosa from Mexico, the Caribbean and South America.Indigo is not necessarily a plant but a property of many plants, Thayer explained. Indigo does dissolve in alkaline solutions, such as those made with lye, baking soda, ammonia, urine or washing soda. Today textile manufacturers still use indigo-although a synthetic form-to dye blue jeans. Until the late 1800s, indigo provided the only way to get blue color into fibers. “It’s also the only natural dye that gives a real, true-blue color,” she added. It does not dissolve in water, nor does it adhere to material. “Two problems make indigo a dye unlike any other dye in the universe,” said Cynthia Thayer at the 2004 Common Ground Country Fair. Cynthia Thayer of the Wednesday Spinners demonstrated dyeing with indigo at the 2004 Common Ground Country Fair.
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