the japanese indigo plants had reached critical mass. (as had my dilletantism.) we had spectralite, and we had ammonia. we were so ready.
we began by getting our leaves together and heating them.
i chose some things i wanted to put in the pot. they weren't all white; i had a few skeins of lopi that i didn't really love the colors of. i had handspun (my own and a buddies, and in the form of both yarn and hat), and i had some boring white worsted. in the long run, i realized that i wasn't going to have enough blue to go around for all of this, so i compromised and not everything made it in.
we had problems with the first batch; nothing happened (except a bad smell. do you know that in ancient japan, indigo solution was made alkaline with stale urine, then fermented in the sun? yay!) we could see that we had done something almost right, as there was a slight suggestion of blue to our yarn now.
ben
said it looked like a very pale person's face. if we were fancypants handspun yarn moguls, we might have called this yarn "cyanotic".
then, we did a "post-mortem" and some troubleshooting on our dyeing session, and headed back out to decimate the plants. this time, it worked. go ahead, load the video -- to see the absolute magic of yarn going from a sickly yellow to a wonderful blue. it's about a forty five or fifty second movie, so it'll take even the fastest of you a few seconds to get ready. but i think thou will be pleased.
here's some blue, smelly yarn for you. i hope we did not take so many leaves off the plants that we won't be getting another batch in august -- this was fun! anybody have anything they wish was blue? or that they wish stunk really bad?
it seems the wrong time to mention, but blue is one of my least favorite colors. what turned out best in my batch was the natural grey-brown handspun (not my own) that got a very interesting, meaningful, hazy color.