Today we take blue jeans for granted. But before the time synthetic dyes could be made to color cotton yarn, blue fabric was not always so easy to get.
Here in the poor mountain province of Guizhou featured earlier, minority women still extract natural indigo from the plant Indigofera like it was done before the turn of the 20th century. The indigo is used to color their beautiful ethnic costumes and other household textiles.
This ethnic Miao woman is in the process of extracting the indigo blue from the leaves... And I couldn't help wonder how long it would take for her hands to turn back to their natural skin color.
Guizhou, 2006
These images are posted for Alphabe Thursday hosted by Jenny where the prompt was the color INDIGO. Click on the link to see how others posted for the theme.