(All the thanks ever to THL Jerusha for taking the photos in this post; I am most often taking the photos, and therefore I don’t appear in many, so I am immensely grateful to friends who are shutterbugs.)

I now have proof that I dyed myself colors! Really really! Mostly from the indigo workshop, because indigo is so very cool. Smelly, but cool (did I mention that one of the main ingredients in the dye bath is urea?).

We did a bath in a tub sort of accidentally; THL Willoc set the mother starter jar in a tub of water to warm, and as happens with wood fires, the tub was unevenly hot. She pulled the jar out when it reached temperature, but the bottom did not come with it. And so we had our vat, there in the tub. Oops. But it still worked.

Pulling lovely blue fiber out of the bath:

Here’s a better image of the range of shades we got (the green that I’m holding in my hand turned blue very soon after; the color change is the groovy thing about indigo):

(I now realize how weird it is for someone in 16th century Gujarati gopi garb to be hanging out with ladies in 6-9th century Saxon garb, but whatever. Hooray, Anachronism!)

I was worried about overdying my sari, so I had a really wicked apron that came out, gifted to me by Baron Hajji on the occasion of our first joint Halloween party:

Serafina stirs a yellow dye pot of some sort. Safflower? Sage? It’s probably sage.

The skulls matched my garb so well.

As happens, the indigo bath lost its potency briefly, and had to be revived. We tested by dipping little bits of undyed wool into the liquid and seeing how dark the wool became, and how quickly. Light color isn’t necessarily bad, as long as it isn’t blue right away; indigo only fixes in the presence of oxygen, and blue indicates that it has already been oxygenated. I think this particular test wasn’t going so well (but W got it started again anyway):

And then I took my little bunch of peacock feathers and voted on A&S Open entries. I think this was just after I put a feather on an amazing Viking tunic, all hand-woven and hand-sewed (which was technically part of the Clan Darkwood competition, but it was still lovely):