Since it is getting colder outside and can frost anytime, and plants in this pot is not getting any flowers ( I do not know why), I decided to cut it out and take the plants out of the pot and experiment with the fresh leaf dye.
This is what I harvested. As I had to work fast and my scale was out of battery… I do not know exactly how heavy it was, but my guess is 100- 150g of leafs.
Following the recipe from a book (and there are many similar recipes online), I place them in a mixer with 500ml water. (The recipe said also ice, but i do not have them so I skip this part) and blend them well, and make a smoothy. Then filtered through a kitchen towel (old one, as it colors the fabric, it may not be usable as kitchen towel). At the end I squeezed the liquid, the result looks like Matcha.
then, add skein of wool yarn. I had two ~100g scoured wool skains, so I dyed them in parallel. The first photo is from the first dip. It looks like wool yarn in Matcha. after leaving it for 1-2min, take it out and squeeze out all the extra juice, hang it for 1-2 min, then dip in water and rinse out the juice. At this moment, it starts to oxidize and you see the color turning greenish blue to turquoise blue. The second photo is after 1 dip and wash.
I repeated this process for many many times (I guess around 10?) until the indigo juice turned dark blue and not dying yarn anymore. I actually was not sure when I should stop and what to do with the juice afterwards. I just threw it to the drain this time, but maybe there are something one can do more with it. I guess there are more potential pigment in this water. The photo on the right is what was filtered out from the smoothie. I put this in my Bokashi compost. Hopefully this is then going back to the field for the next year.
As the active dye time for fresh leaf dye is short (~1h), I had to work very quick. After the dye water is not active, I washed the wool yarn well with cold water, squeeze out extra water and let it dry. I got a very nice turquoise blue yarn. It is different from dark blue you can get from sukumo but also very nice color in the yarn palette.
