End of season for our first indigo experiment at the O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm. The farmers are now going to mow down the row to switch to a cover crop; we collected some seeds that had already set and also put some flower stems aside in a bucket of water to see if they'll… Continue reading fresh indigo (the last of)
The cloth finally went in the indigo today -- five dips at five minutes each, then a final pH-neutralizing soak in vinegar water. The indigo vat as mixed was sitting at pH 12.5 so I added fructose to bring it down to 11.5. That's still high for dyeing silk but I figure my warp has… Continue reading dye day
After cutting my yardage off the loom and giving it a quick wet-finish, I spent some time trying to decide what "shape" it should take in the final work. I ended up deciding on a hanging double-width panel (with a "display" area for indigo shibori something like 27" square), with the remaining cloth to be… Continue reading Stitching; vat
Last week I found some time to perform some preliminary studies on a sample of indigo-dyed cotton fabric. I first took some representative optical microscope images to get a sense of the distribution of dye in the cotton fibers. Below left is an image at 103x and on the right an image at 1010x. System… Continue reading indigo up close
Intermateriality:Redox 