Japanese Indigo

Grow your own blue dye! Indigo is one of the oldest plant textile dyes, and it’s pretty as an ornamental, too. These vigorous plants produce an abundance of side shoots for cut-and-come-again plant dye material and, as they mature they yield pretty clusters of pink flowers. Achieving the famous dark blue hues requires advanced dye techniques, but it’s easy (and fun!) to produce aqua, teal, and pale blue-green with fresh leaves. In our trials, we had good results with the fresh leaf method on natural fabric blends pre-treated with soya. Some excellent blog tutorials on the process can be found via The Dogwood Dyer and Rebecca Desnos.