Indigo Dyeing a Scarf

At the end of 2016 I did an indigo dyeing workshop at Woodford Folk Festival. It was lots of fun, and produced a scarf that I was very happy with. 

Indigo is an organic compound that produces a strong blue colour. It is used in traditional textiles in Japan, with stunning results. Essentially you clamp, fold or stitch your fabric, like you do with tie dye, so that the dye can't reach certain areas. This is what creates the pattern.

Being a modern workshop, we took our cotton scarf and used what came to hand. This was mine: I used beads to create round shapes, and a line of  strong bulldog clips to hopefully make a repeating line pattern down the full length of the scarf.

 This was my friend's scarf: there are tiles onto the folds, clamped in place to make shapes as well.

 And this was my mum's: she wound it around a tin can to create a different effect again.

You don't dip indigo for very long. It is a process where you dip it multiple times to make the colour stronger. One dip resulted in very pale blue; four dips in a stronger blue. I dipped mine as many times as I could: the pots we were using gradually ran out of dye as the group of 10 in the workshop dipped.

My final product: 

You can see the striations from the bulldog clips, which was exactly what I wanted! And the little bubbles from the beads on either end of the scarf were cute. This picture was when it was still wet. When it had been washed a couple of times and dried, it actually looked like this:

A lovely baby shower present for a friend :)