tangent undone

lake inferior

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lake offtario

lake hurton

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.

You CAN make a paste of indigo powder meant for this and squish it into the fiber, wait, rinse, and get blues. But they tend to be patchy