5/30/07

That's right, not my "dyeing"  vat but my dying vat. Lately I've been using freeze-dried indigo crystals, imported from India. They really work well, and are so easy. I just make a big tea bag of them, which I steep in a  (clean) garbage can full of lukewarm water. Wait a little bit, and voila, beautiful indigo. The scummy blue stuff that sticks to the side of the vat, I mix with soy milk and use as paint (thanks, as always, to the instructions of John Marshall). And into the vat for 4 or 5 brief dips --- with 4-5 hour drying times in between dips ---  go the t-shirts and scarves which, with great forethought, I've pasted months ago (well, okay, I usually have a few pasted ahead but often end up scrambling at the last minute to get some things pasted.)

The drawback of the freeze-dried stuff is that, unlike a traditional vat which can be kept going indefinitely, the freeze-dried vat peters out after a few days. Now, since indigo dyeing is a terribly messy process that needs to be done on warm and dry days, and since I live in northern Vermont, my indigo days are limited. All summer long I study the weather in the newspaper, hoping for a good-weather-window of three days. Lucky for me, I just about had that over the past weekend, which was also Open Studio weekend, so I was able to demonstrate the magic of indigo to lots of people. Contrarily, the weather was great Friday and Saturday, rainy on Sunday, then great again Monday and Tuesday. That one bad day really messed things up for me, and here I am on Wednesday with some projects I'd love to finish and an indigo vat that doesn't want to be revived.  I've tried spiking it with thiox, gently stirring up from the bottom, hoping that there's still some live indigo down there -- nothing. The way I know it's , by the way, is that the vat is now thoroughly blue. A healthy live vat would be blue on the top, where air is able to get at it, and a lovely, incomparable green underneath.  When you pull the dyed item out of the vat, it's at first green, then oxidizes to blue in a matter of seconds. There's no mistaking it when the vat is working right.
In contrast, when  you pull items out of the vat they look blue enough, but you're living in a fool's paradise if you think they'll stay looking that way. The indigo will not stick unless it's actually oxidized on the fabric, unless the green-to-blue change has happened before your eyes.

I've gone through all the phases of grief on this:
Denial - Despite my suspicion of the vat's demise, I  dip a few shirts that I already dipped twice yesterday, telling myself that I just can't see the change from green to blue because  the shirts are already blue.
Anger - Damn it! That was 30$ worth of indigo!
Bargaining - Maybe, just maybe, if I throw in some thiox (which will theoretically un-oxidize the indigo in the vat) I can restore this vat for just one more day's use.
Grief - I won't be able to finish those seven shirts in this vat after all.
Acceptance - Oh well, I guess I'd better order more indigo crystals, which my supplier (the great John M) tells me now costs 40$ a pound, due to a tax imposed by Homeland Security (They suspect that the ists might be plotting to turn us all blue.)

My nagging thought that I should be charging more - -- considerably more ---  for the finicky indigo shirts than for the less time-consuming, more predictable fiber-reactive-dye and textile-paint shirts is becoming less of a thought and more of an upcoming event.

Note to self: Study up on more traditional methods of maintaining an indigo vat.