Hard work and dedication to craft. We and many others who work with natural dyes focus (and speak) mostly on the “seen” parts of the craft. Although we do our best to balance that with information about extraction and provenance on our website, the craft and toil of actually making a dye often gets lost. This short clip shows natural Indigofera Tinctoria (the plant we use to create the rich indigo colour on most of the blue things we make) though there are others including the more common Japanese Indigo plants, European ones like Woad and the rare Hom we have used in Thailand. Indigofera Tinctoria is planted in this region of India not just as a dye plant - it’s also used in crop rotation as it fixes nitrogen into the soil which is depleted from other crops (many would call this a regenerative practice, though this alone I wouldn’t say makes it a regenerative in the absence of a more holistic practice). The crops can be harvested once or more a year depending on weather, and they’re swiftly taken to a dye extraction bath where the indigo is essentially quick fermented out of the plant, filtered into a lower pool, then oxidised before being turned into a jam which is sun dried and then ground for use in the dye vats. The act of oxidising the pool of indigo-rich water is what you see the extractors doing with their legs - creating as many air bubbles as possible. In recent years this kicking was replaced by a paddled machine repurposed from the shrimp farming industry - but occasionally they prefer to do things the old way out of respect and tradition, and I suspect the day Shashank @thecoffeeebear went to film it was because they thought it made for more interesting a show.