"It's a science, but it's also an art," he said, dunking the linen into the vat multiple times. Stretching the linen onto a special frame called a Stern, Sebastian dipped it into a massive vat filled with cold water, indigo and lime. Once the patterns have been transferred onto the fabric, it has to air dry for at least four weeks to let the paste set in and harden. Each Blaudruck workshop relies on their own mix of ingredients, but the two everyone is comfortable disclosing are gum arabic and clay. The exact recipe for Papp has always been a closely guarded secret, passed down orally from generation to generation.
#Blue indigo dye how to#
Only a few people in Europe still know how to produce these blocks. I watched as Maria's son, Sebastian, applied Papp to a linen cloth using a centuries-old hand-crafted wooden block called Modeln with fine brass pins hammered into the block in the shape of a desired pattern. They then dye the cloth and the dye-resistant parts remain white, revealing locally inspired floral or geometric patterns – stripes were traditionally common in Burgenland, and regional cornflower and hops in Mühlviertel. They first apply the pattern on the fabric with the help of the mint-hued, dye-resistant Papp paste, which is later dyed over with indigo. Fourth generation Blaudruck craftsmen Maria and Karl Wagner explained that the intricate process of creating indigo-dyed textiles takes weeks from beginning to end. In the hilly Upper Austria region of Mühlviertel, the family-run Blaudruckerei Wagner workshop has been in business since 1878. For Koó, this means working with fashion schools and young designers to revitalise the craft. Much of the Blaudruck knowledge practiced today comes from the original family journals documenting these journeys. According to Alfred Atteneder, director of Färbermuseum, a museum dedicated to Blaudruck in the Austrian town of Gutau, because tracht (traditional clothing) was frequently worn in Austria and Germany, "you will find a particularly large number of blueprint costumes here".Īs craftspeople travelled to learn this new Blaudruck block-printing technique and exchange designs and patterns, a community of practitioners formed. These beautifully patterned textiles soon spread throughout Central Europe and became part of traditional costumes. As a result, it produced a deeper, more durable colour than woad. Indigo dyeing was done in cold water, which kept the dye-resist paste intact. But as Austrian artist and researcher Moira Zoitl explains in her book, According To Blueprint, Blaudruck took off in the 17th Century, when the Dutch East India Company started importing indigo powder from India. Traditionally, blue was a worker's colour. The European practice of dyeing textiles with blue goes back to the Bronze Age when woad, a locally grown plant, was used to dye clothes in present-day Austria. In Germany and Austria, indigo dyeing developed into a distinct tradition that has shaped its language, dress and culture.
People have been dyeing textiles with indigo for at least 6,000 years. "Indigo is the most common and most powerful natural dye, used all over the world for thousands of years," said Lisa Niedermayr, an Austrian textile artist who curated Unesco's Walking The Indigo Walk exhibit in Paris in 2019. Once commonplace, this rare, centuries-old practice nearly disappeared, but is now experiencing a resurgence.Ĭalled Blaudruck ("blueprint" or "blue-dyeing") in Austria and Germany (and Kékfestés, Modrotlač and Modrotisk in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, respectively, where it is also practiced), the name refers to the process of printing a dye-resist paste called Papp onto a cloth before dyeing over it with indigo. Wearing all-blue attire – blue jeans, blue vest, an indigo blue-and-white patterned shirt and a blue apron – Josef Koó opened the doors to his workshop, Original Blaudruck Koó, in Austria's easternmost Burgenland state, a sparsely populated region known for its vast sky and lake landscapes along the Hungarian border.Ī third-generation craftsman, Koó and his wife, Miriam, run one of Austria's two remaining indigo blueprinting workshops.
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