Chinese woad

After a local fox had raided our hügelkultur a few weeks ago my woad bed was a mess. I had only around eight plants of European woad left and two of the Chinese woad. This week I did a salt rub with the chinese woad.

Please don’t ask me for dyeing advice. I don’t know anything about it. For lots of courses in fresh indigo dyeing, have a look at the Dogwood Dyer website or instagram.

The woad plants that are left after the fox attack are thriving. Three compost grids under heavy rocks keep the fox away, although they don’t keep it off other beds. The Japanese Indigo is untouched so far, though.

Salt rub

Salt rubbing with fresh indigo bearing plants is a lovely method that is quick and requires only the fresh leaves and some salt. The salt helps extract moisture from the leaves.

A few weeks ago I did a couple of salt rubs with Japanese indigo, both Maruba and Koyoko. They resulted in clear greenish blues. I knew that woad has less indigo than Japanese indigo, so I counted on subtler colours in this Chinese woad salt rub.

The textiles

I picked the largest leaves from my precious Chinese woad plant in the morning and weighed them. There weren’t many leaves, but they are quite large and resulted in 50 grams. The recommendations I have got is to use at least twice the weight of leaves to textiles. My textiles weighed 10 grams, but I figure the midrib of a woad leaf takes up some of that weight.

I popped in two small skeins of handspun silk singles, two antique linen buttons, a linen patch and an antique cotton patch. I had soaked the cellulose fiber items in soy milk a few days earlier to disguise them as protein fibers and thereby take on more dye.

Rubbing away

With the Japanese indigo, both liquid and textiles turned blueish green after 5–10 minutes, but with the woad it never did. After 17 minutes of rubbing, the colour of both liquid, leaves and textiles was still grassy green. Significantly darker than in the beginning, but not a trace of blue.

I still had hope, though. After a quick cold water rinse, a wash in mild detergent and a vinegar rinse, the woady turquoise emerged and lifted my spirits. My first try with woad a couple of years ago resulted in tiny plants that got totally eaten by flea beetles. How a person can manage to kill an invasive plant like woad remains a mystery. Still, after the flea beetle incident, a first very failed indigo trial the same year and the fox attacks I am very grateful for every tiny dye experiment with my homegrown colour.

There is a difference between the cellulose and the protein fibers – there is more blue in the protein fibers. The protein fibers take up more dye than the cellulose fibers and there is still some chlorophyl in the cellulose fibers. This might mean that the colour in the cellulose textiles won’t be as colourfast as in the protein textiles. But the linen buttons seem to have caught more blue than both the linen and cotton patches.

More than blue

The dye power didn’t end with the salt rubbing, though. With a little help from heat and baking soda the indirubin may emerge, a mauve colour. I covered the remining leaves with some water, added a little baking soda and kept it warm, at around 50 °C. I added a skein of handspun silk singles, a linen patch and a linen button and left it in peace.

After an hour or so the liquid was reddish brown and the textiles olive brown. After a quick rinse, though, the silk transformed into the loveliest dusty mauve. The linen patch also turned mauve, but a little lighter. The button, well, while I can see some traces of mauve, it is mostly brownish grey. There is some of that brownish grey on the silk skein and the linen patch too, and it may be where the leaves have been in contact with the fibers.

Giddy, giddy

Every morning when I open my door to get the paper I see my indigo plant bin and smile (and sigh of relief that the roe deer haven’t eaten it). I am quite giddy about this, and so far it is thriving. The European woad in the Hügelkultur also looks very healthy and I am glad I got so much dye out of my single Chinese woad plant, that now only has a few small leaves left.

My plan is to dye my little skeins of handspun silk singles in as many colours as possible, using different techniques and my different indigo bearing plants. I keep spinning the silk singles (on a supported spindle), anticipating a rainbow of indigo colours. Eventually they will all end up in the same project.

The patches of cotton and linen are just for comparison, but I hope I can find a project for my sweet buttons. I am sure their perfect match will appear sooner or later.

As I write this I look at my dyed textiles with joy while at the same time planning my next dyeing experiment. There are so many techniques to try and when I feel bold enough to try something a bit more challenging I will. I lean on the courses I have bought at the Dogwood dyer and the local course I am taking here in Stockholm. Just two weeks until the last class of the course.

Happy spinning!

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