What I’ve read is that Woad should be planted in March, and harvested at its peak in July. Well, I din’t plant this year until June and July, and didn’t have a chance to harvest until this week, in mid-October. I was able to draw on all my experience. First, I only bothered with the best leaves. The new, not so big and not so small deep green ones. I ignored the temptation of those huge leaves-by the time they get that big, I have discovered through eco-prints (see my Where is the Woad post) that they don’t have enough pigment to bother with them. I didn’t pick that much, because I wanted to try one new thing-a different source of alkali, namely water soaked in the wood ash from the NCC East 40 kiln. I soaked the ash nearly a year ago, and wasn’t sure if it would lose any of its power in that time. There were so few leaves they looked lonely in the bottom of my smallest dye pot. But they yielded enough pigment to show that the leaves have plenty of pigment in them right now-and that I've got my process worked out. Here’s a summary of the process:
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Where is the woad pigment in the plant? The pat answer I’ve heard is “in the leaves.” Not always, I just discovered. In one of the Michel Garcia DVD’s I bought, he makes prints from woad by simply mashing the leaves into cloth with a hammer. He then washed the cloth with a neutral dishwashing liquid (Dawn) and the non-permanent green washed out, leaving a print where the blue pigment was visible. I tried it, and realized the implications almost immediately. The pigment isn’t where I thought it was. I had been harvesting the huge outer leaves, with the idea to give the new leaves room to grow. While that pruning approach worked to make the plants grow like weeds, I had a hard time getting pigment. Here’s that first print. You can see, that the blue is NOT in the big leaves or the stems-there are only the faintest traces of blue in the big leaves. In fact, another print made at the same time as this one, was left outside in the sun and rain. The green vanished completely, but the blue stayed. The blue-the desirable pigment we get from woad-is very stable over centuries, as the Unicorn Tapestries etc. clearly show. The other stuff in the woad “goes away” with the action of water and sun-and that is something I was able to put to good use, more on that later. The point is, the light green you see in the photo above is NOT the pigment, and will vanish. The blue is what I’m looking for. And I didn’t find it in the big leaves-it was far more concentrated in the small leaves! I want to do these woad leave prints on a regular basis to track where the pigment is-and when. On February 14 this year (2023) I made another print. I made the print in a slightly different way, so as not to use up so much of the bamboo rayon fabric; instead of folding the fabric in half and the leaves in the middle, I put paper on one side and fabric on the other. I also used a smoother surface underneath them, with the idea of not losing any of the print to the “valleys” of the concrete block I had used for the first print. The cloth side was blurry and harder to see than the paper side, so in the photo below you see the leaves arranged on top, and the print on the paper below. The print wasn’t as good overall as the one from summer, so maybe the rough concrete block was better? Another surprise-the pigment had left the leaves, but was now in the stems! In summer, it was the opposite. Not only that, it was the larger leaves with the thicker stems that had the pigment, not the smaller leaves. So apparently in the colder weather, while the woad does not go brown and dormant or die like most plants here in Pennsylvania over the winter, the pigment in the plant moves around. So if I want to harvest pigment in winter, do what I mistakenly did in summer, and use the larger leaves! Interesting. I had heard that once the plant looks purple, the pigment is destroyed. Yesterday I picked a selection that was purple in various places. Since I was at home and didn’t have a concrete block, I used one of the concrete steps to my house. The result was terrible, sorry, it makes the photo very hard to “read.” But if you look closely enough, there is no real blue, only purple and green, both of which are fugitive. Every source says the purple leaves are ruined for pigment production, and my own test confirms this. My residency at the NCC East 40 began on June 1, so I didn’t get to plant the woad until a few days into June last year. This year I plan to sow in March as is considered optimum. Woad needs wet to germinate, and isn’t much bothered by cold. That’s next month! Now that I have the eco-print test (mashing the plant onto cloth and/or paper) I plan to do it both on the 2023 crop and the 2022 crop, to see how much pigment is where when! This will give me much more specific information than I have been able to find in any source.
Finally, there was another huge “Aha!” moment that I had inspired from the eco-print process; I can use sunlight as well as water to help get rid of the impurities. Last summer I was processing a large batch of woad leaves that I later learned low pigment content from doing that first eco print. I could tell there was pigment, but there was also a lot of the fugitive yellow that I needed to get out. I did what Garcia showed in his DVD, which is to wash the pigment. You use a fine mesh cloth to catch the pigment, but the fugitive yellow is soluble in water and gets washed through. Every time I rinsed, the pigment got less green looking (from the fugitive yellow) and more blue. But after a half-dozen washings, and all that waiting for the liquid to go through the cloth to the bucket below, I got frankly tired of my kitchen being a mass of buckets and strainers. I dried out the pigment, put it in glass, and put it in the window that gets the most sun. I shake up the little jar periodically, and it continues to improve, at this point I’ve actually used a little in in some paintings. Now that the eco prints are helping me to understand what to harvest when, I won’t have to deal with such an annoying batch again! I planted woad the first day of my 2022 summer residency, see the mother woad, and made another post about the woad balls I made, which preserve the leaves for use in later dye pots. Woad also has a long history as a pigment, for example in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, so I was keen to harvest some of the woad I planted, which is already in peak harvest season. In fact, if you don’t harvest the woad, the leaves underneath don’t get enough light and air and shrivel up and die. Woad likes to get harvested every week or two in peak season, and just grows back vigorously. The extraction process for all indigo-containing plants is similar, so I re-watched a DVD from Michel Garcia where he extracts pigment from fresh Indigo leaves in Mexico. I jotted down the steps in my notebook and headed out to the East 40 where I picked two buckets full of woad. The first step is to pour hot water over the leaves, hot water not more than 120 degrees F. A problem I have with the propane stove, is I can’t effectively keep something at a constant temperature. Hot as it was on Monday, it wasn’t 120 degrees so I knew the pot would cool somewhat, so I started with the water at 120 degrees but then let it soak for 3 hours instead of 2 which would have been enough if I could keep it up to that temperature. The second step after soaking in hot water, is to strain out the leaves; after soaking, all the active ingredient is in the water, but it has to be further processed to bring out the pigment and discard the rest. At this point, the water is green-the blue indigo pigment isn’t formed, it is chemically not indigo yet, but rather the indigo precursor indigotin. Long story short, in the DVD the indigo at this stage was green, but I knew from doing woad dye pots that woad is “sherry colored” (essentially a brownish red) at this point. So far so good. The next step is oxygenating, and bringing the PH up to 9 with Pickling lime. That’s when you should start to see a blue froth, and if you oxygenate long enough, the froth goes away and then you let it settle for a couple hours, and the pigment sinks to the bottom. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Spoiler alert, spectacular failure is in the title of this blog post. My liquid turned bright orange, no matter how much I oxygenated, and boy did I oxygenate. Zero pigment formed. Undeterred, I went home and bought streaming access to the first Michel Garcia dye workshop-the only one that I didn’t own because I couldn’t buy it as a DVD. In the first workshop, he used woad, not indigo. The steeping time for the leaves in the hot water is 15 minutes for woad, not 2-3 hours. Oops. The next day, August 9. was the last day of my residency, and I went out to the garden and picked more woad. Since I had harvested so much the previous day, and had such a spectacular failure and wasted all of it, I only picked a fraction of the amount from the day before. I took comfort at how fast woad grows, and that I could tinker with smaller batches until I got it right. I did the whole process again, et voila! The water I strained off wasn’t yellow like it was supposed to be, it was bright green. But after the soaking, oxygenating, pickling lime and letting it settle, there was indeed a gorgeous blue pigment! I scraped the pigment onto a sheet of glass so that any remaining water around the solid pigment particles would simply evaporate. The next day I scraped the dried powder off of the glass and put it in a little jar. The powdered pigment will last for literally thousands of years, it does not fade or change, and you can add whatever binder you want to make whatever paint you want. For egg tempera, all you have to do is mix together some of the dried pigment and egg yolk and you’ve got paint, and you make only what you can use that day, so that was the first paint I made with my brand-new woad pigment! I didn’t mind my spectacular failure. The more ways you do something wrong, the more you get to understand what matters and what doesn’t in a process. Before GPS, I would go somewhere according to a set of directions. If there was construction, or I made a wrong turn, I had no idea where I was. Because all I knew was the one way. But the more I got lost, the better I got to know the area. A lot of things are like that. Spectacular failure, or even not-so-spectacular failures, can lead to better understanding, and yes, success.
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