To dye with indigo, one of the easy way is to use fresh leaves. This is also old way of getting color out practiced in indigenous people of south America. There are many recipes and tutorials online (like this one). I recently met people growing dye color plants at a community garden in Berlin. The last weekend, Madlen and Netti from this group kindly gave a workshop about natural dying including Indigo fresh leaves dye. Here is a documentation from the workshop process and how the outcome looked like.
The process we used is very simple. pick indigo leaves and add spoon full of salt and kneed it until the juice comes out. It is like making Kimchi. The salt promotes the water in the plant to come out.
Then, mix in the textile material (it has to be natural fiber). We tried wool, cotton, linen. it looked like all of them took the color well. I did not wear gloves and my hands were also dyed blue. Well, human skin is also protein. Protein fibers dye very well with natural dye colors.
Here are the results. Many of them came out greenish blue/ turquoise color. The photos are taken when the fabric is still wet and before washed with water. I imagine it looks much lighter blue when dried.
Here is a photo of fabric after wash, and dried. from left Marigold, Fresh Indigo leave, Oak nut + saffron flower.
More photos from the workshop: (Thanks Madlen, Netti!)
