Persicaria tinctoria, also known as Japanese indigo, is one of the most notable plants in a natural dye garden.
To kick off the apprenticeship, we began our 1st harvest around 7am on Tuesday July 15 2025. We were led by Rosa Chang and Kenya Miles the founders of Blue Light Junction. First we said a prayer offering gratitude and considering invitation for our collective ancestors to enter the space with us through the harvest. This was one of my favorite parts.
Inspection and Bundling photo by : Rosa Chang
As we began inspecting the indigo plants (Polygonum tinctorium), we looked for deep green leaves and sturdy green stems—signs of healthy plants full of indigotin potential. Reddish stems or red-tinged leaf tips can signal a nitrogen or phosphorus deficiency, which can sometimes be addressed mid-harvest with foliar feeding or soil amendments.
We began to cut them approximately 6-9 inches from above the ground above the nodule. We then removed off yellow , dry, and blackened leaves from our trimmed crop. These can affect your pigment color and health later down the line. For good measure- Take a few moments to gently pinch off damaged or discolored leaves by hand and discard them away from your processing area.
Amanda "Ama Liza" Gough Carrying Bundles Photo by : Rosa Chang
We either created a bundle to be hung and dried and later composted OR we placed them aside to be rinsed and soaked in water for a quick ferment. We had plenty for both processes. You can commit yourself to just working through one of those processes.
Fresh indigo submerged in water after the rinse Photo by: Amanda "Ama Liza" Gough
Harvesting it properly ensures maximum pigment yield and a smoother dye process.
Pro Tips:
• Harvest in the morning before the sun wilts the leaves.
• Keep leaves cool if you’re not processing them the same day.
• The fresher the leaves, the brighter the dye yield.
• Compost your removed yellow/black leaves to return nutrients to the soil.
By taking the time to sort, cut, and prepare Persicaria tinctoria thoughtfully, you ensure stronger color results and a deeper connection to your dye process. Whether you’re a textile artist or a backyard dyer, each step is part of a larger cycle—connecting land, labor, and legacy in every blue thread.
Polygonum tinctorium plants at the Farm Alliance Black Butterfly Teaching Farm
Dear Indigo Shade Map Friends,
I hope your summer is off to a wonderful start!
I’m excited to share some meaningful news as we prepare for our first indigo harvest of 2025. For the past five years, I’ve been carefully refining the process of extracting pigment from Polygonum tinctorium (jjok, 쪽)—indigo plants lovingly grown at Blue Light Junction in Baltimore. This plant not only connects me to the land but also reflects the cultural practices of my ancestors, which I strive to honor by following traditional methods as closely as possible.
This year, I’m launching something especially close to my heart: an Indigo Apprenticeship Program, created in collaboration with Blue Light Junction.
This program is an invitation to step into the slow, intentional rhythm of indigo work—through hands-on practice, shared labor, and community-based learning.
More than just technical training, the apprenticeship offers participants a deep, experiential understanding of the full cycle of indigo: growing, harvesting, and pigment making. It also holds space for cultural storytelling, collective care, and meaningful conversations around sustainability, resilience, and the deeper purpose of working with plants. Also, just fun study group!
Through this blog, I’ll be sharing highlights, reflections, and behind-the-scenes moments from each session—offering a more personal glimpse into the work and what this journey means to me. Let me know if you'd like to adapt this for social media or print materials as well.
For the first session of the Indigo Apprenticeship Program, we’ll gather three times:
Tuesday, July 15
Thursday, July 17
Saturday, July 19
Our very first gathering will be Tuesday, July 15 at 7:00 AM, when we’ll meet bright and early with Kenya Miles, the founder of Blue Light Junction, at the Farm Alliance Black Butterfly Teaching Farm to harvest indigo together. We’ll continue the processing work at Blue Light Junction later in the week and weekend, following the full cycle from fresh leaves to pigment.
We plan to repeat this full process again in August, once the next round of indigo matures—typically 4–6 weeks, depending on the weather and soil. I’ll share details about that session as the time approaches.
This is just the beginning, and I’m so looking forward to sharing what unfolds. Thank you for being part of the Indigo Shade Map community. I hope you’ll enjoy following along as we document this inaugural indigo apprenticeship journey! Please subscribe our newsletter to catch up!
Indigo Shade Map is thrilled to share the story behind Inside Indigo through a special interview with Julia Tabakhova. We hope you enjoy this brilliant book and the insights it offers!
Please find Julia’s indigo cultivation story in Calvados, Normandy, France, in our latest On the Map Series post here.
A cover page of the Inside Indigo
WHY I CREATED IT
Indigo predates science and therefore cannot be solely studied under this lens.
For INSIDE INDIGO, I wanted science and poetry to coexist, to explore indigo chemistry and plant biology outside the lab, but with scientific rigor, intertwined with wonderment intrinsic to anything magic & scientific.
There has long been a need in the indigo world for visualisations detailing the chemistry involved behind the techniques of vat making, extraction, fresh leaf and so on. The scientific documentation on indigo has existed within the field of chemists and scientists for 142 years, but sparingly among dyers.
Once the understanding of organic chemistry and plant biology becomes second nature, it gives you a new metric to explore and experiment around indigo from a different vantage point.
To make those visualisations effective, I preferred drawings to photographs because they are more helpful in illustrating the steps in the different phases. Symbols have been used throughout time as a way to supersede barriers in language.
The tools and precision involved in making these hand drawn illustrations make the process a close relative to the traditional Japanese wood block technique and gives an analogue feel to the book, something to keep the reader immersed into the real world of indigo. This was an intuitive decision as a metaphor for the merit of working by hand.
The friendly colourful drawing style is a backdrop to a more serious and science based content applied to various recipes in a side by side column to the left hand pages. INSIDE INDIGO explores indigo chemistry with an iconography designed for the dyers in order to make it palatable, to grasp key concepts and make the indigo science experience for the reader fun and accessible through first hand recipes and hands on experiments.
I intentionally made the drawings evolve through a visual arc to ease into the complexity, starting with whimsical molecules at the beginning, then morphing slowly into their accurate carbon ring anatomy on the very last pages to tag along the learning curve of the reader.
HOW I CREATED IT
INSIDE INDIGO started as a place to put things, ideas and drawings, one molecule at a time. To articulate the invisible, give a new face to the standardised reaction schemes. And experiment around these visuals. Bridging the boundaries between science and the dye world. Trying to translate these levels of complexity and scientific convention into palatable concepts for the neophyte. To make accessible what the scientific community has studied and drawn through reaction schemes and short hands that fall under pre-established scientific convention, sometimes hard to grasp.
By definition, experimenting means going to territory where you've never been, where failure is very possible. I was terrified and went through self doubt a million times. Indigo binds to other molecules but it also binds people’s hearts, and the support my close-knit indigo community and friends* provided me during these last 3 years made this book possible.
All in all, 3 years of work, 2 years of readings, researching, studying, experimenting, refining, percolating, distillating, sedimenting and decanting this pigment of indigo knowledge. The third year was the hardest: at full speed, the book made itself between my hands. Hand-drawing, digitalizating, and finally organizing the pages in order to make indigo chemistry easy.
More often than not, it felt as if the book was asking for certain pages more than the other way around. It was an urge, a calling, I never experienced this level of frenzy and manic inspiration to this magnitude with my previous projects.
This book marks a scientific footnote in my long examination of indigo for almost ten years. If you've been following me for a while, you know how much time I've committed to experimenting and researching around indigo and indirubin.
In a nutshell INSIDE INDIGO is Science Meets Fun! A devotion to indigo at the service of the blue community 💙
Details of the Inside Indigo
*Foot notes: This book could not exist without my peers. Just to name a few phenomenal contributors to the knowledge on indigo featured in the book and in the bibliographie and references:
Tim McLaughlin and Charllotte Kwon from @maiwaschooloftextiles
