Once the fermented leaf liquid turns this color, one choice is to let the pigment settle over days or even weeks, and slowly remove the yellowish waste water at the top. Eventually, only pigment will remain and can be scraped out of the container. It can take weeks for the water to evaporate and the pigment to settle! Each time you remove the top layers of water, the pigment is disturbed, and can start to rise up towards the top again.
As I experimented with dye-making, the plants on Governors Island flourished…
This is some pigment from three 5-gallon vats. Each vat was filled to around 3 gallons of liquid. I did not weight the leaves, so I cannot give precise quantity of leaves to volume of liquid.
