Once the only blue dye in Europe, woad pigment made a fortune for the sun-rich Toulouse area during the Renaissance, when it also was called Toulouse’s Blue Gold.

In some places, woad is considered invasive, popping up alongside roadways and in ranch lands. To extract the dye is a complicated, multiday process. The plant’s leaves are chopped and soaked in ...

Meanwhile, the woad leaves were heated and then cooled in water to create natural indigo dye to colour the linen blue. Image source, Homegrown Homespun Image caption, ...

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. Traditionally, blue was a worker's ...

Woad produced yellow dye, madder produced red dye, and woad produced blue dye. These plants were indispensable in the ...

“We’re growing flax for linen and woad for indigo dye with the aim of growing our own pair of jeans in Blackburn,” said Justine Aldersey–Williams, a dye expert, head of North West England ...

THE old East Anglian proverb, “As blue as wad,” occurs to one visiting the Woad Mill described by Mr. Darwin in NATURE, in 1896 (vol. lv. p. 36), as evidence that woad once yielded a blue dye.

The woad plant responsible for the blue dye on the fearsome faces of Braveheart's Scottish fighters may one-day battle cancer too. Close. Advertisement. Skip to content. Sign in.

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. Traditionally, blue was a worker's ...