Summer’s over and the bounty of the garden is harvested. And as the leaves change around Peg Castle’s Jaffrey home, so, too, do strands and skeins of wool turn radiant colors in her mixing bowl.
A batch of Japanese indigo, steeped at 160 degrees, sits in a large mason jar.
“If you really look in there, you can see little bands of blue that the leaves have released,” Castle said. The high temperature allows the natural colors infused in the leaves to separate; once that happens, one can muddle up a batch of wool in with the natural dye.
The result is stunning. Wool that starts out gray or beige turns to a brilliant blue after just a short exposure to the indigo’s yield.
Castle squeezes every drop out of her crop, careful not to waste any of the plants she’s grown in her garden and mindful that every bit of dye she gets means more intense shades for the wool.
“I think they like the heat,” she said, gesturing to her indigo plants, which thrived this summer despite the region-wide drought. Castle’s garden is sizable, with flowers of all hues sprouting up around the yard in large patches, demarcated and tended, though most of the plots are overflowing with color, plants reaching their heads up to the sky for a little more sun.
Artisans have been working with natural indigo for thousands of years, far before synthetic dyes were created. Years ago, Castle said, she might have joined a dyers’ guild to learn the craft, with knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Nowadays, all it took was some internet research, after her sister urged her to try the technique. Still, it’s not just a matter of watching a Youtube video and then throwing some seeds in the ground; it’s been a few years of trial and error before Castle really got the process down. The more practice she got and research she did, the more she was able to produce, and now her colors shine bright under the afternoon sun.
“I think it’s really good to understand what’s going on,” Castle said, “because it can be tremendously frustrating if you don’t realize all that’s going into it. You really have to respect the process and understand that it took a really long time for people to figure out how to use indigo.”