Going for a light blue with indigo

In the past, I could not get a good light blue with indigo. I finally sprung for 3 of the Michel Garcia DVD sets, they have 2 disks in each set, and got some great information about how to get a light blue. Indigo is not soluble in water, it’s a pigment, and historically there have been endless variations from nasty smelly two week or more old urine, to contemporary nasty chemicals that have been used for what we can a “vat” to reduce indigo into a soluble form. I used the Michel Garcia 1-2-3 vat, which uses indigo, fructose and pickling lime. Not nasty. In fact, both the pickling lime and fructose I bought are marketed and sold with the intent of being used in food. The basic idea (ph pun, sorry) is to make the dye bath alkaline and “reduce” (take the oxygen out of) the indigo so it becomes temporarily soluble in water, long enough to get it into the cloth fibers. When you take the cloth out of the vat it should be green! On exposure to the oxygen in the air the indigo once again becomes insoluble, but at that point trapped in the fibers.

I made the starter solution for the indigo vat in a quart mason jar. I actually have a nice blue bucket that I have dedicated to using as an indigo vat, but one advantage of making a starter solution in a glass jar is you can see what’s going on better. Below, you can see how on the left the pigment isn’t because it’s too blue, especially at the bottom and top. But on the right, the bottom is a dark green and above it is a kind of brown; only at the top, which is exposed to oxygen, is it blue. This is actually what we want-on the right, the indigo is reduced.

From the top view of the jar, you see the bubbles and the metallic sheen; YES. This is what we want to see. I heated water up to 120 degrees and put it in the 5 gallon plastic bucket, then added the starter solution I had made in the quart jar. 

Back to the light blues; if you don’t get the indigo deep enough into the fibers, you end up with the color only on the outside of the fabric where it can rub or wash off. The solution (oops, another pun, sorry) is a very weak dye bath, so that you can soak the cloth in the bath long enough to get the indigo deep into the fiber. (Duh, why didn’t I think of that. I suppose that’s why I paid to get the DVD’s, Michel Garcia gets the big bucks.) I used only 1 tablespoon of indigo in my dye solution, for two and a half gallons of water in the bucket. 

For the residency, I was able to get 4 new fabrics that I had not worked with before, and was eager to test how each would absorb the dye, so I cut strips of each of the 4 fabrics. After soaking the fabrics in water, each got 3 dips for about a minute each in the dilute indigo vat. Above, you can see these strips on the drying rack. From left to right, pure wool gauze twill; this was unbleached, and had a yellowish look before dyeing. I was actually quite happy with the greenish tinge on this. Then, hemp silk charmeuse, hemp cotton muslin and finally on the right bamboo rayon. 

On the drying rack photo above, I had not yet rinsed the fabrics. I wondered if the kind of mottled appearance was because I hadn’t ironed the fabrics before dyeing, but then when I rinsed and ironed them the blotchiness went away. What I just learned is that because water has so much oxygen, I could have rinsed them before letting them dry. 

What’s nice about natural dyeing is that there can be such nice results all along the way. A beginner can do something stunning, but there’s always more to learn.