see sideblog for the trucy fanpage

Because I am Like This, what really tickles my fancy is specifically natural dye. Why? Because there's an element of adventure to it. It requires me to grub around in the ditch after goldenrod and crawl down into a creek bed after reed plumes. When you're doing it, what's gonna come out of the dye pot? The weather the plants grew in and the soil conditions affect things! It's neat!

This is great for the bajillion million squillion plants on this planet that will dye stuff yellow. I have hard tap water so madder root behaves like an absolute dream. There's black walnuts everywhere around here so tasty browns are no problem. I've got a gallon pickle jar of iron bits in vinegar to sadden those colors to olive greens and various grays.

However I am now running into the same thing humanity has run into for 10,000 years when dyeing with natural stuff; blue. Which comes from indigo or woad, of course. That's fine.

But more specifically, why is the simplest method for making indigo play nice a bucket of piss. YES THERE ARE OTHER METHODS BUT THE SIMPLEST AND TIME TESTED ONE IS A PISS BUCKET.

Right so

Indigo and woad contain the same dye compounds. They are, chemically speaking, complicated. The blue dye of indigo is the result of indigotin. Indigotin is insoluable in water and won't bind to shit. In the plant you will not find indigotin, though. You will find indican, which is colorless, water soluable, and loves to bind to anything it can touch. Wool. Cotton. Linen. Hands. Wood. Plastic. Whatever.

Indigo is usually sold in cakes of the extracted pigment, and has been for centuries. Woad was normally sold in balls, which are made by pulping the leaves, rolling them into balls, and letting them dry. To dye with either of these, you have to force the indigotin to break back down into indican. You have to do this by putting them in a room temp vat of something alkaline and removing oxygen. Under these conditions the indigotin will revert to indican and you can dye with it.

There are many ways to do this. Most of these methods are precise, complicated, and involve fucking around with precise amounts of fructose and yeast and calcium hydroxide or washing soda or a color remover/oxegen reducer known as thiourea dioxide. Humans are remarkably clever inventive little apes who love color and we've figured out many methods over the thousands of years we've been using indigo and woad.

However.

The simplest method? The very easiest that like never fails? Is to get a bucket of piss and let it go stale. Piss is alkaline, and has bacteria in it that remove oxygen. You get a bucket of piss, you add indigo or woad, and then you wait a bit for the indigotin to dissolve and you can dye the most heartbreakingly beautiful blues. And emerald greens and purples by overdyeing yellow or red.

Every other method humans have come up with to use indigo or woad are basically us trying to get around the Piss Bucket.

And yet, the Piss Bucket still remains undefeated as the simplest and most foolproof method.

When I was a kid in about... Grade 8, I want to say, we had the Decameron in history of literature class. (For those who don't know, it's a book of short stories framed as "told by people trying to quarantine from the plague". It's mostly horror, humor and sex. Think COVID entertainment, but maybe more terrifying). We had a few stories from it selected in our reader, and the assignment was "pick a Decameron story and do an oral retelling."

At the time, me and another girl had just ceased routinely beating the shit out of each other with chairs, and instead had become friends in one of those delinquent-nerd duos. She taught me street smarts, I taught her weird intellectual shit. It was a beautiful friendship.

So of course when I saw the Decameron on the curriculum, I told her "you realize a lot of stories in that book are basically porn, right? Let me get you the unabridged version from my house."

My friend's eyes lit up. She read the whole thing in a few days.

Class time comes, and for the first and only time in our class one of the class delinquents shoots her hand up. The teacher goes, "oh wow, what just happened? All right, go ahead."

And of course my friend picked one of the pornier tales. If I recall, it was about a monk seducing a nun by telling her that men had devils, and women had hells, and occasionally one must contain a devil by sticking him into hell. The teacher has no choice but to listen because the assignment doesn't specify "pick a pre-selected story from the reader". It just says "pick a Decameron story."

The retelling was fantastic, as hilariously funny as the story itself, (she did voices and gestures!) and my friend got the class listening on the edge of their seats. My friend got her well-deserved A, the teacher got a pedagogical challenge, and it was a win-win all around. :P

meanwhile i can just say like “ROAD work ahead?” and i would bet a good chunk of you have just read that in the guy’s voice. i still see people tag things like “i wish i was jared, 19″. one night at the bar where i work we started an impromptu dance party purely by saying “hi, i’m renata bliss, and i’ll be your freestyle dance teacher”

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences