Indigo

We’ll be one of the 10 instructors at this amazing week-long fiber retreat and festival June 24th to July 3rd, put on by the fabulous Dotty Widmann and The Net Loft in Cordova, Alaska called the Cordova Gansey Project. Join us as we journey outdoors to harvest and dye with a variety of local plants […]

For the first time Pantone introduced not one but TWO shades for 2016 Color of the Year: Rose Quartz and Serenity.  Pantone describes the colors: Rose Quartz is a persuasive yet gentle tone that conveys compassion and a sense of composure. Serenity is weightless and airy, like the expanse of the blue sky above us, […]

Join us Saturday December 4 at JaponTex at the historic La Conner Civic Garden Club in La Conner Washington.  JaponTex is a free event for all things Japanese and features textile artists Patricia Belyea, Mary Pettus and Sylvia Pippen.  The artists will be showing their holiday gift items and Botanical Colors will make an indigo vat for dipping for you to […]

According to the BLUE ALCHEMY: Stories of Indigo site, the documentary is a feature-length documentary about indigo, “a blue
 dye that has captured the human imagination for millennia. It is also about people who are reviving indigo in projects that are intended to improve life in their communities, preserve cultural integrity, improve the environment, and […]

We’re so excited to see our Botanical Colors natural dyes featured with one of our favorite customers on Cool Hunting! Cool Hunting writes: “Olderbrother, the new clothing line started by Portland, Oregon-based designer Bobby Bonaparte and LA-based Max Kingery, has a whimsical, minimalist aesthetic that is partly influenced by the duo’s fascination with Japanese design […]

The San Francisco Chronicle writes: “Rebecca Burgess is on a quest for the perfect jeans. And by perfect, she means a good fit, but also something much deeper than that. Her denim has to have a good conscience. Her dream pants need to be made without heavy metal-based synthetic dyes that pollute the environment, woven […]

Our 2 day natural dye class called Colors of the Prairie at Scattergood Friends School, a Quaker boarding school in West Branch, Iowa was so much fun. We walked with naturalists, did some prairie crawls, played in the classroom with indigo dipping and swam in the sweetest little pond every night. Here are some shots […]

Design Made in Japan came out with this amazing article on indigo dye as they relate to wood products for the home. They write: “Thanks to contemporary Japanese craftsmen and a growing interest in more ‘naturally’ produced goods, a renewed interest in aizome is taking place due to the quality it yields and sensitivity to […]

According to Phys.org, Berkeley bioengineering professor John Dueber has studied the chemical steps plants use to naturally make indigo, and he thinks he has found an environmentally green way for the industry to churn out the dye without the use of toxic compounds. “When plant leaves are healthy, a chemical precursor to indigo, called indican, […]

The website Colossal writes: “Hot on the heels of a post earlier this week about centuries-old guide for mixing watercolors, I stumbled onto this 18th century instrument designed to measure the blueness of the sky called a Cyanometer. The simple device was invented in 1789 by Swiss physicist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure and German naturalist Alexander […]