Spectacular Failure Leads to Success: Woad Pigment

This is the finished woad pigment I made on the last day of my NCC East 40 residency.

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.

Soaking the woad leaves in hot water-if you look closely you can see the water has turned "sherry colored"

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. 

Pouring back and forth introduces oxygen. This was actually the later successful attempt; you can see the foam is blue.

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. ​

Spectacular failure. The opposite color from what it should have been!

​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. 

The two jars on right are the "juice" that was taken off the top of the pot. At left, this is from closer to the bottom of the pot, you can see the blue pigment suspended in the water. I had to wait for this to settle more before filtering.

Here you can see the green juice that will eventually sink through the filter, and the blue pigment that the filter is keeping on top.

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! 

Here is the wet pigment on the glass, right after it was scraped off the filter. The first photo at the top of the post is actually the finished pigment after it dried and I started putting it into the jar.

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.