I dyed a hand-woven (by one of their students, not me!) silk scarf using bamboo sticks and rings for resist and an indigo dye pot.
Since the pattern is mostly symmetric (white diamond shapes in an indigo field) we started by folding the scarf neatly. For the diamonds, we used pairs of bamboo sticks to sandwich the silk and tied them together tightly so that dye would not get to that portion of the silk scarf.
The design at the ends of the scarf include small circles, for which we used two crosscuts of bamboo (of the same diameter) for the resist.
Here is the piece, all ready for dying:
After thoroughly wetting it down in water, it was time for the dye bath.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever used indigo, but it is really strange. The dye pot is full of this olive green sludge (complete with fruits to feed the ferment) and it has this stunning head of dark blue (well, indigo, to be exact) foam on top.
Here is a star fruit I found in the vat:
The fabric is not just soaked in the dye. You rub it vigorously in the dye vat, bringing it up for air periodically to let it oxygenate.
Between the bamboo sticks and the initially dark olive of the cloth when you take it out of the pot, the piece looks almost like a banana leaf!
Here the fabric has begun to oxygenate, taking on a bluer hue:
After dying it, we rinsed it well in clear water, and then hung it out to dry. One of my fellow students thought the indigo stank, but I couldn’t smell anything…
