Online Workshop: Fresh Indigo Five Ways – Blender, Salt, Tataki-Zome and More!
Taught by Brittany Boles, of @SeaspellFiber
July 20, 2024 from 10-12PM Pacific
The workshop will be recorded and available until October 20, 2024
REGISTER HERE: https://botanicalcolors.com/shop/workshops/intro-to-fresh-leaf-indigo-dyeing-blender-salt-tataki-zome-and-more/
We are excited to host Brittany Boles of Seaspell Fiber for an online workshop using fresh leaf indigo (Persicaria tinctoria) and an array of techniques to get the most color out of your precious indigo crop. Brittany is a wonderful instructor and we’re honored to work with her again and offer this workshop. This is our most popular indigo workshop as many people grow Japanese indigo and are looking for ways to capture the beautiful, elusive color.
Do you have a Japanese Indigo (Persicaria tinctoria) patch and aren’t quite sure what to do with it? Brittany Boles has suggestions for using the fresh leaf in a number of ways to extract beautiful colors including a lovely violet from the fresh plants. She experiments with various fibers and techniques that you can try with your own indigo!
What is included in this workshop? In this Intro to Fresh Leaf Indigo Dyeing: Blender, Salt, Tataki-Zome and More, Britt will demo multiple ways to use fresh indigo to extract seafoam blues, emerald greens, and indirubin purples with various natural fibers. As a special bonus, she’ll also show how to use our new Vibrant Valley Blue Indigo Paste with soy and cellulose fibers for beautiful saturated pigment painting!
We’ll start with a brief history of the plant, growing and harvesting tips, and demo methods for achieving blue on protein and cellulose fibers.
Workshop Details
Who is this class for? This class is for all growers from a few potted plants to backyard plots to large scale farmers of Persicaria tinctoria (Japanese Indigo). Feel free to relax and view class as lecture style, but if you’d like to learn along live, you’ll need access to fresh plants. Britt recommends 5-10 Persicaria tinctoria indigo plants for the best experience.
My plants aren’t ready yet! Relax and watch the live workshop and then review the video when your plants are ready. However, if you want to follow along with Britt live, keep reading. If you have already started Japanese indigo this year, your plants should be ready to harvest in July. If you haven’t started your seeds yet, start them now. If you don’t have seeds, check online now for companies offering seeds or seedlings and get them in the ground or into a pot.
What if I can’t attend the live portion of the workshop? The workshop will be recorded and available for 90 days after the workshop date, which is October 20, 2024. You will be sent the access link to view the video. As well, download the resource PDF that accompanies this online workshop.
Participation guidelines The purchase of this online workshop and document download is for 1 person and the link to the recorded video is for the purchaser’s use only. Please respect the artist’s expertise and generosity and don’t share or distribute her material or content without express written permission from both Brittany Boles of Seaspell Fiber and Botanical Colors. We appreciate your cooperation.
What will we create? We’ll dive into seafoam blender blues, turquoise salt mash, and Tataki-zome leaf prints. Three hands-on applications for the freshest alive blue hues…and a bonus! indirubin-pickled Indigo (left over salt mash), fresh overdye over other garden colors, and fresh lake making (with leftover blender liquid). We’ll also try out Vibrant Valley Blue Indigo Paste as a pigment to use for saturated painting and printing.
Supply list:
Approximately 5-10 Persicaria tinctoria Japanese Indigo plants
Journal/notebook & pen
Blender
Scissors
Salt
Large bowl
Hammer, mallet, or a palm-sized smooth rock
Small bucket
Various scoured protein fibers(silk, wool or blends) and cellulose fibers(cotton, hemp, linen, bamboo, etc.)- small/sample size pieces- some dry and some wetted out. Visit our How To page for scouring information
Soy beans (soaked and made into fresh soymilk) or plain, premade commercial soymilk.
Muslin, cheesecloth, or elastic paint strainer bag
Rubber band/string
Ice/icepacks
Water
Optional:
Gloves(if you don’t want stained hands and/or to avoid getting salt in any papercuts;)
Mason jar with lid
Watercolor paper/brush
Vibrant Valley Blue Indigo Paste
About Brittany Boles:
Brittany Boles is founder of the Indigo Pigment Extraction Methods global network, Blue Biographies interview series, and co-founder of Indigofest. She has been nurturing a relationship with indigo for 8 years and brings 20 years of experience as an artist/teacher/musician/poet to her practice. Community color and local source connections are the inspiration for Britt’s work with farmers, schools, and local textile artisans.
Many lovingly call Britt an “indigo doula,” for her patience and love for the indigo plant and bringing its color into this world. In this Fresh Indigo Five Ways – Blender, Salt, Tataki-Zome and More! class, Britt brings that same patience in her teaching and sharing of lots of exciting and helpful information on the nuances of growing, harvesting and producing blue from indigo through the blender and salt method as well as Tataki-zome leaf prints.
