Jen Powell designs

I’ve been growing indigo to use in natural dye projects. It’s growing well, about a foot tall. and I had to figure out when to harvest it. I searched online and found I could use it right now, just harvesting the leaves. You need to harvest the leaves before it flowers, and you just cut what you need and leave the plants to keep growing.

I have heard that the normal process of indigo dyeing can be really complicated, but I had seen a video online before where someone was just smooshing their fabric together with leaves and got color that way. So I found a couple of videos online and watched, and went out and picked my indigo.

I took some samples of fabric to dye – the left is some mystery fabric – I think maybe a silk blend or some kind of synthetic. It took ecoprinting really well, but that doesn’t actually tell me what it is. It’s a nice, light but luxurious fabric. I think it’s a silk blend maybe. I stitched some black embroidery thread into it to mark it. Then I have some silk sari ribbon, and then two pieces of actual silk that I bought. The top one I stitched a little to try to get a shibori look. The piece on the far right is cotton. I did not treat any of the fabric prior to doing the indigo dyeing.

I went and picked my leaves. I got a decent sized bowl of leaves.

I mixed them with some course salt. Once they were well mixed I put my fabrics in and then kept smashing them together (wearing gloves):

I mixed them by hand for about 8-10 minutes. I then rinsed the fabrics and hung them up to dry. Here are my colored fabrics:

I was still in the process of drying them but wanted to take pictures. My known-silk pieces dyed the darkest. The mystery fabrics were a lighter teal color, about the same as the cotton. Pretty good for a quick experiment in natural dyeing. Now I plan to use these in some of my textile collage projects.