It’s a weekend!! Do you know what that means? That’s right,project time! The last few weeks I’ve had something I’ve wanted to do and things keep getting in the way: bathroom remodel, guests over the weekend,cleaning out the garage, etc. . .Actually, I have wanted to do this one for years, I think about it every summer when I see the Dyer’s Woad all dried out and going to seed, yet somehow I’ve never gotten to it. Having delayed this one for so long, I decided that THIS was the weekend it was going to happen: it’s time to attempt dyeing with Woad!
Woad (Isatis Tinctoria) is a weed around here, it was a commercial crop intentionally planted by the pioneers (from what I’ve heard it was one of the original dyes used to make blue jeans?), but it has since gone feral and now is considered highly invasive. Not only that, but it has long since been replaced by synthetic dyes so it doesn’t have much of a use anymore. Ironically enough, I read about how people in Europe and Eastern U.S struggle to grow this dye plant in gardens — here we’ve been trying to eradicate it for quite some time and have had no luck. They even had a bounty on it for awhile and would pay people to collect it by the trash bagful. Difficult to get rid of. Which is a boon for those of us who like to use natural dyes as it is one of the few really good blue dyes available! In fact, it was a major crop in various parts of Europe as a valuable source of Indigo for centuries.
Fortunately, if you have woad growing in your area you’ll recognize it immediately as it is quite distinctive with it’s drooping black seeds on a dried out stem. Unfortunately, it’s a biennial and by the time you see those black seeds it’s already worthless. But hey, at least you will know it’s in your area and can keep it in mind for next year! Actually, from the information I’ve been able to find on extracting the dye, you want to use the 1st year leaves anyway so if you find the dried stems you just need to look around and see what you find nearby. 2nd year leaves don’t contain much dye. … Even if not, I can see why it isn’t used as it dries out so quickly it would be inconvenient to depend on.
Around here woad grows on drier hillsides, road cuts and fields. Here in Utah if you remember seeing a lot of wild mustard or thistles in an area it’s a good bet there’s woad growing there as well. I harvested mine on a dry hillside just off a road. As you can see from the pictures there is quite a bit of it and I collected a grocery bag full in about 20 minutes.
Originally I had great ambitions to do two batches, one of 1st year leaves and one of 2nd just to see how much of a difference it really made. As such, I collected about half a grocery bag of each. Of course, then while washing them I realized I had an elk hide out soaking in the backyard that needed to be scraped that afternoon and a few other things that needed to be done around the house. As such, that experiment got shut down and I combined them all into one batch. Maybe next time eh?
When you locate some woad and harvest what you need the first step is to wash it. Remove any other plant matter, dirt, etc that may contaminate your dye. Then tear your leaves into smaller pieces to speed extraction, I didn’t tear mine very small as I was in a hurry, I probably could have gotten more dye out if I had shredded them a little finer. Put some water on to heat while you wash; for this batch I used about a gallon of water and that seemed to work fine with the amount of leaves I had. Keep an eye on the water though as you don’t want it to boil. Aim for just below boiling prior to adding the leaves, mine got up to 190 F before I turned it off. Steep the leaves for 10 minutes just as you would a tea. Make sure everything gets stirred under and watch the color change. It shocked me how dark the water got in such a short amount of time. . . Not sure why that surprised me, what else should I expect when extracting dye? The indigo dye you extract is heat sensitive so you want to cool your dye off quickly once the ten minutes are up, I filled my kitchen sink with cold water and added ice cubes, then drained and refilled it again after that got warm. Strain the leaves out and discard. At this point you hopefully have a pot of very dark greenish/brown water.
How do we go from green brown to a lovely blue dye? Change the ph. You want to make this an alkaline solution (ph 9-10). I used washing soda because I have some I use for making laundry soap, the other one you frequently hear of people using is soda ash (a common swimming pool additive). I doubt baking soda would be strong enough, but you can try it and let me know! I dissolved 6 tsp of washing soda into one cup of water. Be careful with this as a strong alkali will burn you just like a strong acid so take necessary precautions.
After you add the soda, you’ll need to introduce some oxygen to the solution in order to get the pigment to precipitate. Natural dyeing websites will tell you to use an immersion blender dedicated to nothing but dyes. . . Nice thought huh? Not having an immersion blender, let alone one dedicated to things like this, I opted to use a cheap plastic potting bucket. Fortunately I still had a few from planting the garden a few weeks ago! Just dip it into the dye pot and pull it out, letting the solution stream out of the holes in the bottom of the pot and back into the dye. Think up-sized version of a fish tank aerator. Your solution should develop a foam on top, watch it change colors from green to blue. Mine went blue after about two minutes of aerating…. and then promptly went green again and stubbornly refused to go blue again regardless of what I did. After aerating for 20 minutes I decided that it was as good as I was going to get it, at this point it was a sort of pale mint green color.
Your solution at this point will color things blue (as evidenced by the picture of my fingertips), but it will not bind and stay permanently. At this point water will still wash out the color, a highly undesirable trait if you ever intend to wash whatever you dye with it! To make it permanent you need to remove excess oxygen from the solution. Traditionally, the dye vat was fermented for long periods to allow the oxygen to dissipate (future project, I didn’t have time this weekend). Modern dyers use chemical reducers such as spectralite to accomplish the same thing in just a couple hours. I didn’t have any of that laying around and, besides which, I have an aversion to using chemicals (doesn’t that defeat the purpose of using a “natural” dye?) so I spent some time searching for an alternative. The only suggestion I got was from the Georgeweil(insert link here) website, which suggested using yeast to accelerate fermenting the dye and reduce the oxygen content. Makes sense to me, if it ferments my bread it should work just fine for dye right? We’ll see. I added 2 tablespoons bread yeast and 3 tablespoons of ordinary sugar to my gallon pot and stirred it in. At this point georgeweil says to leave it for 48 hours, it is now roughly 2:30 pm….
….. 4 pm the next day, I got impatient. Story of my life. Amazing how that happens sometimes huh? How does the dye look? Well, I don’t think I would get very many compliments if my shirt was that color. Kind of a cross between the colors of pond scum/algae and sewage lagoons. Attractive, I know. On the positive side, there is a scum of deep blue all the way around the pot. Anyway, not having much in the way of white cloth around the house I resorted to going to the store and buying a pack of cotton tee shirts to test the dye with. I also scrounged up one of my sons’ plain white onesies, hopefully this works or I may hear words from my wife about ruining it. . . I soaked my articles in water for about an hour ahead of time to get them fully saturated and allow the dye in quickly. Thinking ahead for once I just put in one of the shirts to test the dye.
I left mine in for 20 minutes (aimed for 10 but then grabbed some dinner while waiting) before pulling it out to let it air out. Supposedly it will change from a green when you pull it out to a blue as it hits oxygen. Mine didn’t, 15 minutes later still green. Hmmm….. attempting to figure out what went wrong led to the wearingwoad (insert link here) website which told me that green is often a result of the solution being too high of a ph. I guess 6 tsp of washing soda was too much…. lesson learned. Maybe I should get ph strips next time to test it! Fortunately it also told me that giving it a light rinse with vinegar should change my shirt to blue. So I dabbed my finger with vinegar and touched the corner of the tee shirt. Success!! It is now a light blue instead of green. I want a darker color so I returned it to the pot for and repeated 10 min in 10 min out until I was satisfied with the hue. Then I rinsed them out in cold water till before letting dry completely.
Before I put the shirt back in for a second time, I got to thinking that maybe it hadn’t dyed very dark because the pigment had all sunk to the bottom. After all, I had just let it settle for 26 hours. So I stirred it lightly and put the shirt back in the dye. This time I definitely had some streaks of darker blue as nice random highlights. Also, the color was more of a blue green instead of just green, so maybe it helped. Regardless, every time I let them air out they would look greenish yellow but as soon as I put them back in the pot the would look blue again. When I rinsed them out after finishing, my rinse water went all yellow and orange, and after that my shirts looked blue. Which is logical, yellow and blue makes green. Apparently I had a lot of loose yellow in my dye that didn’t bind? I haven’t read of anyone else having this happen so maybe it’s just a product of the odd, cobbled together process I used.
Rinse you’re dye project until the water runs clear and then wash it to ensure you get any excess dye that hasn’t bound out (hopefully I don’t have to tell you to wash this by itself….). Isn’t it a lovely color? Tag/send me pics of your dye project, I’d love to see what you all made!
Helpful websites:
How can you tell the difference between a first year plant and a second year plant?
A bit late now…. But that’s pretty straightforward, Woad is a biennial so the first year plant doesn’t send up a flower shoot. It stays as a basal rosette. Actually, if you’re in an area with a lot of Woad you’ve probably passed by the first year plants without realizing that’s what they were, people seem to overlook them since the second year plant is so noticeable.