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Dabu Success!!!!
After i returned from India last March I was really keen to have a go at Dabu dying. This is an indigo based dying process that uses black mud as a resist. I had told the proprietor of the dabu factory we visited that I was from a lime rich area and he kindly shared the proportions of Lime, Arabic gum and mud, telling me I must practise when I got home as it was an art form that was in danger of dying out.
I tried but I did not have an indigo vat at the time and tried with tumeric. The pattern was there very lightly but not enough to be easily discerned. I decided to wait till Summer and set up an indigo vat for the purpose.
Well time has moved on and Summer is almost over - in fact we are in the first few days of Autumn if you go by the traditional calendar. So I decided to set up a new trial making sure everything was as close as possible to what I experienced India.
I used an Indian wood block in the shape of a scallop shell and an offset printing in rows. My mix was a little bit runny and I dropped a couple of blobs from the block onto the cloth. You can see in the second photo where I have attempted to sponge these away. My fabric was a 100% cotton sheet that I had sourced from a thrift shop and scoured with soda ash and alkaline neutral soap at 60 ° in the washing machine
I created the Indigo vat by using a kitset that supplied 100gm soda ash, 50 gm sodium hydrosulphite and 20 gm of pre reduced indigo. I mixed it in a bucket with a lid that I have used for indigo dying previously and after 15 minutes or so a nice “flower” was beginning to form on the top of the vat. To test if the vat was ready I placed a small strip of cotton tied in knots into the vat, waited a little bit then carefully lifted it out. Care must be taken not to introduce oxygen into the vat or it will expire. It came out green as in the photo below of the strip on the yellow bucket lid. The magic of indigo started to happen almost at once. In went the Dabu prepared piece. Left it for a little and then took it out carefully. By the time I got to the clothes line it was already turning blue. Where the fabric had been folded was still green as it had not oxidised but a few minutes on the line and the blue was pretty uniform - even where I had to sponge off the blobs.
I wondered if the soda ash in the mix would offset the process of scouring. Would the soda ash in the mix mean you could place a pre printed white on white piece of commercial dyed fabric in the vat and would the print act as a resist. I have had some rather lovely results with preprinted commercial fabrics but I have always scoured them first. I trotted off and found a fat quarter. Into the vat it went and the results looked promising. We will see when it is washed how well that process worked. That is the last photo in the gallery below.
Now I have an indigo vat and will have to work at creating some interesting results this next week.