welcome

I grow my own indigo here in Cincinnati, on the ancestral lands of the Myaamia, Shawnee, Osage, and Kaskaskia peoples, and the Adena and Hopewell cultures before them. I grow persicaria tinctoria, a subtropical indigo-bearing plant, planted by hand and watered through the long Ohio summers until it's ready to cut and process into dye. That's where Folk Indigo actually starts, in soil and patience rather than anything you'd find in a factory, and in a debt to the land and the people who tended it long before I did.

The fashion industry moves at a pace that's hard to reconcile with how I want to live. Billions of garments get made and thrown away every year, and the real cost lands on people and places most of us never think about. So I work slowly, rescuing fabric from thrift stores, from neighbors, from my own closet, and dyeing it with plants I grew myself.

In 2017, I started growing indigo without knowing where it would lead. Somewhere in that first season I found the thread connecting indigo to batik, a tradition rooted in Java and Yogyakarta, where I'm from. That discovery sent me down a rabbit hole of history and culture, tracing how indigo and batik have been intertwined for centuries, and how natural dye and a life lived in harmony with the land were simply how my ancestors knew to live.

That rabbit hole also taught me something I didn't expect: indigo doesn't belong to any one culture. It belongs to the world. The plant I grow here, persicaria tinctoria, is a subtropical indigo. In Indonesia, what we traditionally grow is indigofera tinctoria, a different indigo-bearing plant suited to tropical regions. That thread runs wider than my own heritage, and I've come to see it as an invitation that through that shared practice, across cultures, we can learn from each other.

This is batik, a practice rooted in Java, where I'm from. This is indigo. This is mending instead of replacing, all of it tended now in the soil of southwestern Ohio, where I've made my home.

If this work speaks to you, there are a few ways to be part of it.