Indigo: The Ancient Color in Your Closet

Achieving these dreamy blues requires a lot of work! First, a dyer ferments the leaves of an indigo-bearing plant to extract blue pigment, then aerates and dries it to produce cakes of indigo dye. Next, the dye is placed in a container and reduced, a process that removes oxygen, to make it soluble enough to penetrate fibers. At this point, the dye turns yellowish green. Finally, the dyer soaks cloth in the vat, then exposes it to the air. As the indigo oxidizes, it transforms from green to blue, reverting to its insoluble state that will not wash out. How ancient people might have figured out how to do this, in various places at different times, remains a mystery.

I had the privilege of partnering with local artist Devan Horton (pictured below) to help illuminate this complicated process for Taft visitors in the exhibition Indigo and the Art of Quiltmaking. Devan earned her BFA in painting from Northern Kentucky University and now works with sustainable paints and dyes (when she’s not painting alley-sized murals [2]). 

According to Devan: "I started experimenting with natural colors with the hopes of creating a more sustainable medium, which got me out in the woods and made me feel like a magician. There are few pigments more magical than indigo. It is an incredible dye to work with for reasons beyond its impossibly blue hue. Being a fermented vat, indigo is longer-lasting than most botanical colors and you do not need to mordant (pretreat) your fabric. Indigo is a wonder that has fascinated humans for millennia, and will continue to do so."

This past summer, Devan dyed five pieces of linen with indigo, using a different technique for each. Here are three of the methods Devan used:

Resist Method

A paste traditionally made of clay, starch, or wax resists the absorption of indigo dye in areas of fabric the dyer wants to remain white. Devan made her resist paste with soy flour and hydrated lime—a calcium compound produced by heating and adding water to powdered limestone.

Printing

First, a printmaker incises a design onto a metal plate, wooden block, or, in Devan’s modern example, a linoleum block. A dyer then applies indigo dye to the block or plate and presses its surface onto fabric, transferring a mirror image of the design.

Discharge Method

A dyer applies paste that removes or “discharges” indigo from specific areas of pre-dyed fabric. The paste may be applied by hand or via printing. Devan applied her discharge paste through a paper stencil. Adding another colorant to the discharge paste can deposit a new color, such as yellow or orange, to the bleached design.

Museum visitors will be able to touch these samples, with the goal of contributing to their understanding and appreciation of the twenty quilts on view in the exhibition. On loan from the International Quilt Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska, all quilts in the gallery contain indigo-dyed fabric and date from the early 1800s to 2015. I hope that, through this collaboration, visitors will also recognize how the ancient art form of dyeing cloth with indigo remains alive today, from the blue jeans in your closet to intricate hand-dyed fabrics and spectacular textile artworks.

The author gratefully acknowledges Devan Horton for her contributions to this project and Eric Vice for capturing the images in this article.

Indigo and the Art of Quiltmaking is organized by the International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.