Woad

One of my dye herbs that I planted at the house was woad. Unfortunately I was only able to have one plant growing at the house. All the rest never came up from the seeds that I started, you will have this and I hope for better luck next year in that department.

Any way I got some leaves from the plant to make a vat of dye. Before anyone says anything I know that one plant is not enough to dye large patches at once so I’m only going to do small ones and keep over dyeing to see how dark I can get the samples.

I used Rita Buchanan’s book A Weavers Garden, to help me with creating the vat since I’ve never worked with fresh woad or any woad come to think of it before. The first step was of course to pick the leaves. Which I did and placed them in a clear quart jar, then the book says to bring water just up to the boil and pour it over the leaves I did this as well.

The next step was to leave it alone for about an hour till you have a tan red color liquid. I didn’t do that part, what I did was to leave it set for twenty four hours in full sun. I used the hot water to get the process started and left the sun do the work of keeping it warm for the rest of the time. I left the leaves in for this long to get as much of the blue out as possible. With such small amounts of woad at one time I want to get as much out of it as I can.

The next step is to remove the leaves then add some sodium carbonate also known as washing soda and a lot of air or oxygen into liquid to turn it blue. I will say that mine never turned blue when I added air with a whisk for ten minutes no less. No instead mine was a muddy swamp water color and at that point I was hoping I had the right plant. So I moved on to the next step.

For this step I could have chosen several methods to remove the oxygen from the vat to render it usably. Since I really didn’t have a lot of success with some of those options in the past with indigo vats I went the easy way out and used Spectralite also known as sodium hydrosulphite and left it sit for about an hour. As the oxygen is removed from the vat the vat will turn a yellow tan green color.

Of course mine is neon yellow, so here the moment of truth has arrived, is this a woad vat or did I pick a foreign weed thinking it was woad. I am happy to report as I removed my neon yellow yarn from the vat it started to turn green and then blue. So yes it was woad and I did every thing correctly and I got cool results. I was never expecting a dark color, there wasn’t enough leaves for that but I did get blue on the first try too.

For any one new to woad or indigo dyeing I want to recommend that you use the power of the sun to keep your vat at the correct temperature. Also if you use a clear jar you will be able to see the changes in the vat and learn from them. Last year I had a hard time with my indigo vats trying to figure out which step I was at. This way I can see the different stages as they happen. Or you can wow all the kids in the neighbor hood with this fun experiment or project.