Butterfly Pea Flower
By Tanya May - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18938742
Recently, I’ve rekindled an interest in fugitive dyes, which I have long believed to be underutilized in time-based work. I’m in the middle of testing several batches of ink, which I’ve based off my Butterfly Pea Flower dye recipe. Butterfly Pea Flower, or Clitoria ternatea, is commonly used as a tea. Many may be familiar with it due to the “color-changing” beverage craze of the late 2010s, of which it was a key ingredient.
Butterfly Pea Flower, or BPF, produces a beautiful cyan color. As a dye, it turns cotton a light cornflower blue at its weakest, and a pale ultramarine at its strongest. Washing will bring out grey tones. Over as little as a month, fabric treated with this dye will show significant fading under sunlight, eventually returning to white. After Everything (2021) used concentrated dye in lieu of watercolors on multimedia paper. It took between six and nine months for the dye to fade completely.
Acidity has a high degree of influence over the outcome of color. A higher PH, produced with vinegar or citric acid, brings out purple tones. A lower PH, as produced with baking soda, will bring out cyan. It is unclear if the PH affects colorfastness- this is a question I would like to test in the future.
My purpose for experimenting with BPF is to develop a more practical method to use this pigment. I would like to be able to achieve greater detail by reducing spread and increasing saturation. I especially need to find a method to improve shelf stability. The nature of my original dye recipe necessitates its use within a few days (at most) after steeping. After a few days at room temperature, the dye will produce a sour smell and quickly begin molding. This will be slowed when refrigerated, but only by about a week. As such, a great amount of the organic material is wasted, its application is rushed, and it is impossible to execute an idea without a large time commitment to prep work. As well as improving on these two qualities, viscosity and shelf-stability, it is also critical that any changes or additives not interfere in the fading process. A colorfast BPF dye is something I may be interested in in the future, but at the moment, my love of the material is specifically tied to its impermanence.
As mentioned earlier, I have several batches of ink that I am in the process of testing- six, in fact. I already have a clear sense of their ease of use and am currently waiting on the results of extended sun exposure. I imagine that by January 30th, I should have a fair idea of its colorfastness, though I’ll likely continue the test until February 15th.
As this has become rather longer than intended, I think I will end this here. I will be documenting my process here in the future, starting with the inks. And with any luck, I’ll do so soon.