Hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's lab.
So up on the hillside behind me are some yellow flowers, and I have a sample of it in my hand right here
This is called Dyer's Woad.
This is considered a noxious weed in this part of the country,
because it is quite bitter
and so nothing really eats it, except maybe goats.
And it covers entire hillsides,
It grows like crazy, and it crowds out other plants,
So it's actually targeted as an eradication program.
Where the county has actually offered a bounty on this at some times.
Now what happened originally is that this was imported from Europe.
Because you could actually make dye from its leaves.
Its leaves actually contain a blue pigment,
which is chemically very similar to indigo.
It just has a lower concentration than the indigo plant does.
And so what this plant was originally used for was extracting that blue dye
And using it to dye fabric and things a blue color
which, blue was a very difficult color to achieve.
But nowadays of course, blue dyes are very easy to synthesize chemically
and so this plant is completely obsolete in terms of the blue dye extraction.
but
I figured that since that is something it was used for and I've got plenty of it,
I thought I might try it out,
and see what it takes to actually extract the blue dye from this stuff,
and actually dye something with it.
So in my experiments every part of this plant really actually does have small amounts of the blue dye,
the leaves have the most,
and I've noticed that the very young plants, like these little tiny seedlings,
have the most dye per volume.
I'm not actually sure if that's because it contains more, or if it's easier to extract
cause these older leaves have like a waxy coating,
whereas these younger ones are nice and fuzzy.
and so I assume it's easier to extract it from them
But lets pick a bunch of it
and go back home
and start extracting...
Now that I've got the leaves back home,
it's time to process them.
And the first thing we gotta do,
is chop them up into little peices
So that I can extract the dye more easily.
Alright
Now I got these all chopped up
Got a pan of water on the stove
which I'm going to dump these in.
I'm just going to add the leaves to the very hot water.
I'm just going to push the leaves down into the water
give them a bit of a stir
and then let them sit there for about ten minutes.
Let it steep and make, uh...
woad tea I guess.
Now that this has cooled off,
I'm gonna filter off the leaves
to extract the juices.
So now I'm going to add in some washing soda.
This is sodium carbonate.
Really any base would work
First of all I'm going to dissolve it into some water just to make sure it all dissolves.
The dye just forms in an alkaline environment.
Historically they would have used soda ash,
or even just straight hardwood ashes.
to do this.
but, living in modern times,
I've got a little bit of a shortcut here.
So now that it's dissolved I'm going to add this in there.
I'm not really measuring most of the ingredients,
because it really just needs to be basic,
it's not really reacting with the carbonate much.
Now what this does is actually, it's turning the dye blue.
But it doesn't really look blue yet, does it?
That's because there's a lot of yellow pigment in there.
And it's combining with the blue pigment that I just formed,
and it's just making it green.
So now, I've got to get this blue pigment out of there, without the yellow.
Another step here
is that some of the blue is actually dissolved into solution
I want to get this blue to fall out of solution,
and to do that I've got to oxidize it.
because in an oxidizing environment,
the blue dye is non soluable.
Whereas the yellow should be.
So I'm just going to put this into a jar
with some air
and give it a good shake to aerate it.
Now that it's had some time to settle out,
You can see that the dye, or the pigment, is down on the bottom of this jar.
It looks green, but
I assure you it is blue, I've just got to wash the rest of that yellow out.
So what I'm going to do is stick a tube in there
Which I have right here
and I'm going to siphon the fluid out down to about this point,
Then I'm going to fill it back up with water,
and repeat until this water above this
is just about clear.
So now that I've washed it a few times, you can definitely see
That the pigment is blue.
Very nice
I'm also running the water out one last time,
Looks like I'm losing a bit of the pigment there, but it's not really that big of a deal
I'll get this put into a little bottle now.
So now for the hard part
You see I could just dry this out, then rub it on something and
that would make it blue, but it wouldn't be like water proof,
you could just wash it right off.
What I need to do is dissolve this dye
Into a liquid
and then soak that into the fabric
And then re-precipitate the dye out
like convert it back into the insoluble form while it's inside the fabric.
Now there are chemical methods to do that
There's a chemical they use, it's thiourea dioxide
which reduces the dye and can make it so it dissolves back into solution
But, in ancient times they would have used a fermentation process
So I think I'm actually going to do that
specially since I don't have any of that chemical on hand
and it's rather difficult to track down it turns out
In ancient times they would actually use fermented urine.
And this is, of course, pee which is a couple of days old now.
you can see that the proteins are starting to coagulate and fall out.
but the idea here is that bacteria will actually be using up all of the oxygen inside the solution
and then they'll be so hungry for oxygen that they'll start to steal it from the dye.
Then, once they've stolen the oxygen from the dye,
it'll become soluble - temporarily of course.
It's rather disgusting but I don't mind it too much
I've worked with fermented urine quite a lot in my youtube times, so...
Lets just add a little bit of this
To there
Let's wait a few days and see if the
dye actually dissolves.
So I decided to put all of the dye that I had in there.
because if it doesn't work I can always go get more.
but, uh...
yeah, I see no reason why this wouldn't work.
I'll just keep this lid closed, put it in a warm place
and hopefully the bacteria will consume all the oxygen and turn this back into the yellow color of pee.
Then I can put my cotton shirt in there, and see if I can dye it.
Ahh, my chicks are chirping
well, one of them is
Got some partridge eggs in there, they appear to be hatching.
But also, I've been keeping this
pee bottle on top of it, because it's kind of a warm place to set it.
And you'll notice the dye is actually
lighter in color, and it appears like there is less of it
so this might actually be working now
yeah it's definitely - it builds up a little bit of gas in there and it's starting to smell really bad
I actually ended up inoculating it with a little bit of material from the rabbit pen
and that really caused it to take off.
It's not completely finished, I don't think,
but you know what? It's starting to smell really bad,
and my girlfriend wants me to get it out of here, so...
I'm going to see if I can dye the shirt with it now.
Here's the bottle of urine and woad
and here is a t-shirt I've been soaking in some deoxygenated water.
That'll help the dye soak into it.
So
lets put it in it.
You notice i'm wearing gloves for this.
This smells really bad!
It's like the men's bathroom of a particularly unclean truck stop or something.
Alright, so let's squeeze a bunch of this water out.
Just stick this in there.
Okay
I'm going to put this beaker in there to weigh it down.
Hopefully.
Oh dear.
It may be too big.
It's staying under
Just take that out
and close the lid.
I'm going to let this sit for a few hours
I'm actually going to go to lunch with my sister.
See you guys back in a little bit.
Let's pull this out of there.
See how it looks.
It looks thoroughly greenish.
Smells really bad.
Okay
Let's open it up
See how it looks
It's supposed to turn blue.
As soon as it hits the air.
How about that
I just went to go wash my hands off
And I came back and it's blue.
Oh man that worked perfectly!
Alright I'm going to let that blue up a little bit more.
and then I'm going to give it a good washing
and hopefully it keeps its color.
So after washing it a couple of times removed the incredibly foul urine smell,
It has also removed a bit of the color, but it is still noticeably blue.
I guess I could dip it a couple of more times into the dye bath
and maybe not fold it up so tight
So that the dye can actually penetrate in
because it looks like it got to the outsides of it a little bit better than the inside here.
But it definitely worked and you guys can see the proof of concept,
I think this is very amazing,
if I was living back in the middle ages and somebody was able to do that,
I would have called them a magician.
That was so cool to see that convert right before my eyes.
Well, your guys' eyes.
But anyway, I'm going to put this on.
And there we go.
I'm wearing a shirt that was...well let's just not think about it.
It is dyed using an ancient method.
It's pretty cool, hope you guys enjoyed, see you next time.
Subs by /u/Treereme