If you’ve followed me for a while you’ll know that I used to do a lot of indigo dyeing before the basketry bug took hold. I’ve worked with synthetic and natural vats and also grew Japanese indigo in my garden. I used freshly picked leaves to create beautiful turquoise on silk, and also fermented the leaves to extract indigo pigment.
However, I’ve never worked with a sukumo indigo vat. This is a traditional Japanese method where the indigo leaves are picked, dried, composted and fermented over a few months, before being mixed with ash water to create a vat. The bacteria in the fermented leaves produce the reductase enzyme that reduces the vat without needing to add chemicals. I never had anywhere near a sufficient quantity of leaves, and I also wanted to stay on reasonable terms with my London neighbours – I understand the fermentation process is quite aromatic. 😉
So when Hilary Burns, another basketmaker, announced that she was running a workshop with Japanese dyer Yuki Itaya on how to make a sukumo vat, I was intrigued. The workshop was held at the Root Project on Exmoor, and excellent hosts Caroline and Hadyn provided us with fantastic vegetarian lunches and snacks throughout the weekend, as well as tending the vats prepared in advance.
Preparing the vat
We started by sieving and cooking wood ash before adding it to water and stirring vigorously to create the alkaline lye – a dusty business!
Yuki had brought 5kg of organic sukumo over from Japan, which we crumbled with our fingers. Then we added some ash water and mixed it to a paste, first with our hands and then with our feet!
More ash water is gradually added over a week, but the vat can take a month or longer to be ready. Interestingly, when the vat is ready, it is blue. Other vats I have worked with are usually a yellow-green colour when they are ready (blue indicates that they have been oxidised and need to be reduced). There is also no “flower” of indigo on the surface.
Also interestingly, Yuki assesses the condition of the vat by look, smell and touch. She can tell the pH by how “slippery” the liquid feels, and looks for bubbles and sheen on the surface to see how the bacteria are doing.
Dipping
We could not use the vat we had just prepared, but there were two vats that had been prepared some weeks earlier. One was slightly younger than the other, and we started with this one. Yuki gave us each a piece of Japanese hemp fabric and demonstrated how to manipulate it under the surface of the vat to avoid bubbles and prevent air pockets. She then rinsed it and agitated it in fresh water to help the oxidation process. The colour was a beautiful pale teal.
After dyeing our hemp we were let loose on dyeing items we had brought with us. We experimented with wool, linen and paper as well as cotton. One student had brought some clamps and resists, so some had a go at itajime. Others tried dip dyeing, while one student did some mokume stitching on a shirt.
Over the weekend we were also treated to the UK premiere of the beautiful Japanese documentary Shades of Indigo, featuring dyers, growers, artists, designers and scientists working with indigo.
Shibori and kintsugi
Before the workshop I had prepared a stitched piece of shibori to dye. The pattern was karamatsu, or larch. I used a recycled piece of cotton that was part of an old sheet I got from a charity shop. When I did a lot of dyeing I used to source most of my fabric and garments from charity shops, partly because it’s good to recycle, and partly because they have been previously washed so don’t need to be scoured to remove coatings before dyeing.
I dipped the piece four times in the older sukumo vat (above) and then unpicked the stitches. However, as I removed the final stitches and pulled the fabric apart, it ripped almost in half! There was also a smaller hole elsewhere in the fabric.
Obviously this was disappointing. But I decided to take it home and do a visible repair in the kintsugi style. So here is the repaired piece.
All in all, a fascinating weekend – back to blue fingernails!
