I’ve been busy sprucing up the shop. It’s looking lovely, even if I say so myself. The pieces are now arranged by colour, and one special cabinet is just for indigo pieces. Next to it we’ve put a small quote by Patch, or Patricia Schonstein as she’s more formally known, from her latest novel, The Master’s Ruse. Here it is:

Once, refugees from the north brought to our region the skill of dying and printing. They were settled beside the sewerage ponds and there seeded plants that flourished like weeds, the leaves of which, when harvested and pounded, yielded a blue dye the colour of cobalt, rich and magnificent. For some years these people salvaged cloth and discarded garments from the dumpsites. These they cut into squares and strips, stitching them together into wide lengths, dying them, beating them with reeds and then dying them over and again so that the fabric acquired a burnish to it. They sold this material through freeslaves who had hawking licences and it became popular among the better classes as hangings and drapery.

The blue-dyers’ industry grew and they accumulated some degree of wealth. But it was soon recognised that, with this financial independence, there might come demands for freedom. It was feared this would engender aspiration among other newslaves.

One day a troop of mounted soldiers surrounded the dyers, striking them down with whips and trampling those who resisted te attach. Guards overturned the vats and their cerulean contents ran into the earth silently and with remorse, mixing with the brown and black of the ground, but finding no affinity there. Later, toxins were poured onto the blue-bearing plants and they never grew again. So the cloth became a symbol of the struggle. It came to symbolise hope and redemption and both newslaves and freeslaves always wear a piece of it, no matter how small, even just a strip knotted around a waist.

A passage from the novel The Master’s Ruse, by Patricia Schonstein