Three years ago, I planted ten woad seeds in my garden. They were hard to find, woad is considered a noxious weed in some parts of the U.S. and farmers can be fined for having it on their property. I weeded the six foot row by pulling things I recognized as weeds. I had been unable to find a picture of a woad plant in all my reading. All I knew about woad was that it was a biennial, it had blue flowers and was an ancient blue dye. So ancient in fact, that it was the dye that the Picts used to dye their bodies before they went into battle against the Romans.

The next summer, the woad flowered, nine plants of it, delicate yellow flowers. I obviously knew even less about woad than I thought. I dug out a natural dyeing book to see what to do with my woad flowers. The book said to use the leaves just before the plant flowered!

I was so discouraged that I didn't even finish reading the recipe. I waited until the flowers went to seed and watched carefully as the seeds dried. Then, just as the seeds were falling off the plants, I harvested them. I now had two quarts of woad seeds.

The following summer I planted a 25 foot wide row of woad. Finally, this midsummer, I was ready to harvest the crop. I read my reference book again. There were no recipes for dying with woad, but six recipes for dying with indigo, one of which said fresh woad leaves could be used instead of indigo. The first recipe for dying with indigo called for four gallons of stale urine "Keep in a tightly capped jar for five to six weeks" the recipe said. Impossible! I wasn't sure I could collect four gallons of urine in five to six weeks, and furthermore, I would no longer have fresh woad leaves in five to six weeks, it would be October and the plants would be dormant. The recipe which called for the least amount of urine (only 3 quarts) specified that it must be collected from a boy child, preferrably in the morning. My daughters are 17 and 21. I don't know any boy children well enough to ask them for 3 quarts of urine. I began to see why this dyeing technique had gone out of favor.

Unwilling to give up with 25 feet of woad leaves and a quart and a half of woad seeds still to plant, I found Colors From Nature by Bobbi A. McRae. On the theory that if one indigo recipe would work for woad they all might, I decided to use an indigo recipe. I cut the leaves from the plants, stuffed them into two quart mason jars, covered them wth water and sealed the jars. Then I put the jars in a water bath and heated them to 160 degrees for two hours until the water in the leaves turned amber (well I would have called it dirty brown).
I set the bottles on my kitchen floor to cool and they dyed the ceramic floor tiles blue. Pretty amazing stuff!

Next step was to find Rit Color Remover and Boraxo (almost as hard as finding a boy child to save urine for me). Then I mixed the woad liquor with a solution of Boraxo dissolved in water. I mixed the Rit Color Remover in water and added it to the woad solution. The mixture turned a yellowish green after about 30 minutes. I added the wool, it came out a nice beige not quite the blue I had imagined. The recipe said the wool would change color gradually as it came in contact with the air. I watched avidly, then casually, then every other day or so. Still beige.

Fortunately, "Spin-Off", the magazine for spinners came to the rescue with an article about woad in their summer issue. I followed Bobbie Irwin's recipe meticulously, including the part where you never heat the dye liquor as high as 160 degrees, and the part where you pour the dye liquor - ammonia solution back and forth between two buckets for twenty minutes (that is a long twenty minutes!). This time, when I pulled the yarn out of the dyebath, it turned from yellow to blue on contact with the air! Success was beautiful, a nice gray blue, not too dark, not too light.

I dyed with woad again the next week, not quite so meticulously. I got a very light beige. Who can tell. I don't have any idea why some recipes worked some of the time and some never worked. Maybe that’s why they are called woad blues.