DIY: Indigo Dye with Cara Marie Piazza

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Our good friend and Botanical Colors customer, textile artist Cara Marie Piazza, was recently featured in Gardenista using our rich indigo.

Writer Sophia Moreno-Bunge caught up with Cara in her studio and wrote:

“Indigo is an ancient color, a natural dye extracted from a plant of the same name, and the only true blue dye in nature. It’s been found in ancient Egyptian mummy wrappings and was so valued by the Romans as a luxury product, the story goes, that the only people who knew how to dye with indigo were hidden away in the forest,” says Moreno-Bunge.

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“Because of its weighty history, I always imagined that indigo was too hard to work with at home. But after a studio visit with textile artist Cara Marie Piazza, I think it seems well worth tackling and not as complicated as I once thought. Cara shared with us her recipe for creating an easy indigo vat, a recipe passed down to her by Kathy Hattori, whose website Botanical Colors is an excellent resource for natural dyeing,” Moreno-Bunge adds.

(Cough) We couldn’t help but agree.

Read the full article on Gardenista here.

Photographs by Sophia Moreno-Bunge