Indigo All Over

My friend Kaye is a traveler extraordinaire.  She recently returned from a road trip that took her to New Mexico, and while there she visited Tierra Wools and saw their natural dyes operation.

In my studies of indigo dyeing I ran across this article about a dye master in Mali.

And then this happened in my own garage yesterday.

Just pulled from the vat, turning blue before my eyes.

Beautiful!

I've begun experimenting with a slightly different dye process.  It is proving to be rather stinky, but the results are so intense that opening an extra door for added ventilation is really no problem at all.

Learning the art of dyeing is a little like learning a second language.  You don't ever forget your first language (knitting), but eventually you see connections between it and your new language.  If you look on the rack in the pic above, you might see a wee bit of wool roving, dyed a glorious indigo.  If you think that this might mean that I plan to attempt a third language (spinning) soon, you might be right....