My first Indigo Dye Vat

Greetings one and all. Time and patience have finally paid off. Here are some of the results. I purchased Japanese Indigo seeds, started them in the house and transplanted them into the garden. All of which I've shown you in previous entries. Here is what happened next:


Here my younger son Ben is kindly helping me strip the fresh leaves from the stalks so they can be stuffed into the dyepot.



The stripped leaves were crammed into by biggest dyepot and covered with water. Then they were placed in a water bath and raised to ~160F over the course of a couple hours. The pot stayed at that temp for about 1 hours then was turned off. Notice the metalic sheen starting to form on the top.



Here's the double boiler setup I used. The reason is to allow temperature control.



From the left: Tunis from the exhaust, the lovely lime color was from indigo exhaust overdying goldenrod on merino. Superwash merino yarn dyed the darkest, but it was the green hinted color found on the tunis. Next was indigo overdyed on the ugliest putty color merino batting I'd ever seen. It took on dark foresty green tones that I really like. Next came mohair roving, followed by more tunis, and last byt the merino roving seen in another picture. There are stil a few more items in the pot that didn't make the picture



Merino roving (left) yielded the truest blue. A lovely sky blue that was quite even. The tunis (right) was a still a lovely blue, but had a hit of a green tone.

As always thanks for the listen. Live well and dye happy!

Leah