With Indigo, it's a slightly different process.
You make the dyebath through a bunch of science like mixtures, and 'oxidize' the water (which sounded really high-tech to me). You don't need to pre-treat the wool at all, except wet it. The tricky part comes when you actually get down to the dyeing part. You can't leave the wool in too long or it will 'contaminate' the rest of the dyebath. And, get this- although you're dying it blue the dyebath is yellow. YES YELLOW. When you lift the wool out of the dyebath it changes magically before your eyes. MAGIC.
I nearly squealed in delight at my potion brilliance. (Slughorn would be proud.) You can only use the dyebath once because as soon as it gets oxygen in it- it turns blue and you can't reuse it. You can, however, re-dunk wool to create darker shades.
This is a sample of my first Indigo experiments (done in Nov 2012).
Also, because I'm an overachiever (Not really, I just get excited) I tried overdying with some wool that had previously been naturally dyed Yellow.Yellow + Blue = Green!Because it was my first time, I only tried little bits and played around with times. The darker blue I 'dunked' several times. I even tried leaving some bits in the remainer of the dyebath once I was done (for like an hour) but it didn't look much darker.You like? Kimxo
Love love love indigo! Like you said, it's basically magic! I just wanted to let you know that you can actually revive an indigo vat to use it more than once. It involves heating it back up and adding more reducing agent to get the oxygen out. Here in Vancouver we're very lucky to have a store called Maiwa where you can buy all sorts of natural dyes and other supplies. They have free information sheets available on their website, so I just wanted to share in case it helps! You can get the indigo/woad sheet here http://www.maiwa.com/stores/supply/instructions.html
Posted by: Tamara | March 28, 2013 at 03:43 PM
Oh my gosh, thank you Tamara!! I love being able to re-use a dyebath. LIVE SAVER!
Kimxo
Posted by: Kim Smith | March 28, 2013 at 04:37 PM
I just love reading about your adventures and experiments!
Posted by: Rita Jo | April 03, 2013 at 04:54 PM