What I did with the woad

So I finally processed the woad plant a few weeks ago.  It was a long process.  I followed the instructions found at woad.org.uk written by Teresinha.  I'm not sure if I did everything correctly because I ended up with such a tiny amount of dye.  Here are the steps I followed.  In the photo below you can see the woad leaves after I picked and washed them.  This is a very large bowl.

Then I steeped the leaves in water which had been heated to 80 C.  I used reverse osmosis water.  Then you have to quickly cool the steeped leaves by putting the pot into a basin of water to which I added some ice.  See photo below.

After straining the liquid I added the soda ash when it had cooled to 50 degrees C.  The next step was aerating the vat.  This is where I may have gone wrong because I didn't have an electric whisk so I used a hand whisk as hard as I could for ten minutes.  Quite the exercise!  It turned frothy and blue, see below.

Next I poured the liquid into a number of jars and left them undisturbed.  See photo below.  Lots of jars!  The liquid looked greenish at this point.

After leaving the liquid to settle for several hours I siphoned off the top of the jars with a turkey baster and consolidated the contents into two jars and eventually one jar.  The top 2/3 of the jar is siphoned off and fresh water put in several times until the sediment at the bottom starts to look blue.  All of this went well.

However when I finally filtered the last sediment with a piece of hobatai silk there wasn't much there.  I don't know if I siphoned off to much?  I don't think so because I didn't see blue going down the sink.  See photo below to see what I ended up with.  There's a little bit of dark blue dye there that I could scrape off.

So I would say I learned a lot from this process but I'm not sure if I would repeat it because I got so little dye.   It makes me understand how much work went into making natural dyes in the past.  Thanks for stopping by!