The third day consisted of making the woad vat from the woad plant we gathered the day before and also finishing up any other extra colors or experiments we wanted to work on.
Here we are chopping up the woad.
After chopping up the fresh leaves you pour boiling water on them and let them sit covered for 45 min. After that you strain out the leaves and wait for the pot of woad water to cool. Then you add washing soda and whisk it until the froth at the top turns light blue.
The water should start red-brown and after whisking it should be a green-brown with the light blue foam. The last step is to add thiox after the foam settles and then 45 min. after it should be ready to use.
The first round was quite light.
The longer you kept it in, the better the color was. You can see its similar process to the indigo vat, where the color is more yellow before it is exposed to the air.
A lot of the greener color from the woad came out when washed.
This was the color we got from the sumac berries. We are very excited about this color because we were not expecting it to be so coral red.
We experimented with the sumac because it has a lot of tannin in it and would react well in this bin of iron. To get the iron we soaked rusty nails in a glass container with vinegar. The sumac dyed fabric when immersed into this mixture got very dark and it turned purply.
Besides the woad and the sumac we finished doing experiments with some shibori.
We also finished the day by cutting the swatches and making booklets for everyone to take home along with larger pieces for the freedom quilters to make a quilt out of.
Later that day there was a meet and greet reception in the halls of the Frist art museum in downtown Nashville. The freedom quilters showed their work and talked about their experience with the workshop. ASK Apparel also had an informational stand to answer questions.
