I always saw the indigo process as very daunting. It’s not as simple as simmering the dye stuff for an hour and soaking the fibre; it takes a lot more time, patience and thought. I had learned and practiced with indigo in school a number of times, but always had the help of peers to figure out the process and fill the gaps. One brave day I thought, let’s try this myself, and let’s use bananas.

Lucky for us, Maiwa offers an enormous amount of knowledge on exactly this topic, and I had saved their document on indigo dyeing many months ago. So on this brave day, I looked into this document, and I began the process of boiling bananas. It’s really not as complicated as I always thought. You boil the bananas, then filter the banana juice, keeping the mashed bananas covered for later when you need to revive the vat. Next you have to make the solution, which I made in a 1 quart mason jar that I later introduced to a larger pot. This is as simple as mixing your reducing agent (banana juice) with the indigo powder, then sprinkling the half the base (calx) and stirring gently. This jar then needs to sit overnight to oxidize. When it’s ready, there will be a flower on the top, the water will be green and the top with be shiny blue. 

The next day, you can build your vat to dye with! Fill a pot with water and heat it up to 50 degrees C, then take off the heat and cover it up to keep the temperature steady. Sprinkle the other half of the calx into the water and stir gently. Gently submerge the jar into the water, without creating bubbles. Now, check the pH; it should be 11-12 for cellulose. If it is too low, add more base; if it is too high, wait a few hours. You should also have a “flower” at the top of the water, which would have appeared overnight while it was oxidizing. When one of these things doesn’t work how it’s supposed to, this is when the patience becomes important.

I wanted to dye a couple things with this vat. First, I experimented with some “shibori” tie-dyeing to achieve some interesting patterns. This is what this process looked like with one dip:

I ended up doing 3 dips with these pieces. It’s a lot of fun pulling these pieces apart after waiting so long to see what they’d look like. I find the pattern has never turned out exactly as I imagined, and I love that. Here is what they looked like after:

I also wanted to experiment with indigo AND pomegranate, thinking it would achieve a green (naturally). My mistake with this thought-process was deciding to do the indigo dips before the pomegranate. Dyeing the indigo first, the material looked like this after every dip:

When the material dried, I made a pomegranate vat and put the blue material in. It ended up turning green, but not exactly the neutral colour I was interested in. To fix this, I added iron to the pomegranate pot. FIY, pomegranate works VERY well with an iron mordant. Turns out, I didn’t need the indigo at all. The pomegranate with iron turns things very green all on its own. In conclusion, the indigo-pomegranate material become a beautiful cement grey shirt.

The three shibori-tied pieces become perfect pot holders for my bestfriend!

I learned a lot through this process, made some fantastic little things and gained a lot of confidence in indigo dyeing. All that said, I am far from an indigo expert. If you are interested in figuring out the process yourself, and maybe even making use of those old bananas in your freezer, definitely check out Maiwa for their amazing resources!