Stitched Shibori Japanese Indigo Design

I recently made up a small vat of indigo using pigment I extracted from the Japanese indigo (Persicaria tinctoria) plants I grew last year.

Extracting the indigo was a process that involved fermenting the leaves in warm water for several days, then adding lime (pickling lime, not the plant) and aerating it to make the blue, indigotin pigment precipitate to the bottom of the container. After the water was carefully strained off, blue pigment is left behind. In my inexperience, and over-enthusiasm, I added too much lime, which doesn’t hurt but it does dilute the pigment. Instead of looking dark blue, my final pigment was kind of a chalky blue-green color. I wasn’t sure how deep of a blue color it would produce so I made up a small vat of dye to test it out.

My cotton test strip looked great! I wasn’t sure what to dye with this small amount of indigo and finally landed on an idea. What better way to honor the Japanese indigo plant that made this color than to create its likeness using a stitched shibori design.

I used a water-soluble fabric marking pen to draw a picture of the indigo plant.

I carefully stitched over the lines, creating the stem, leaves, and flowers.

I pulled the threads tightly and knotted them. This creates a resist. The dye cannot penetrate into the tightly gathered folds so those areas will remain white. It looks like quite a jumble of fabric once it’s all tied up tight!

I dipped it in the dye vat 3 or 4 times to build up the blue color.

When it was dry (or nearly so) I used a seam ripper to carefully cut the stitching. Once all the black threads were removed, I could flatten out the fabric and see the design!

I’m pretty happy with how this turned out! I was hoping that the ends of the stems looked more like the spray of small flowers that the plant has, but instead, they look very similar to the leaves. I have some ideas of how to improve that part of the design but still, I think this is a pretty good likeness of the Japanese indigo plant.

Right now, most of the indigo-dyed items in my shop are dyed with commercially grown indigo but now that I have some experience growing and extracting the pigment myself, I’m hoping to be able to switch more and more items over to indigo that I grow myself!