This is just a brief introduction to the dyestuffs that generally tend to come along with me to workshops, so if anyone sees something in here they are *DYING* to try, do let me know?
This is a photo of a sample of things in my as yet unpainted dyestuff box. I have a couple of large jars along too, with birch leaves and walnut husks and a couple of packets of seeds that I’m hoping to grow in my new garden. I also could have flowers, lichens, cones and seeds I gather on foraging trips and, while it’s not a thing I can document as a period practice as of yet, I will likely try with some mushrooms too.
The standard fare is
Madder (Rubia tinctorum),
I like starting with this one because it’s one of the oldest dyes known. It is native to the Mediterranean region and in ancient Egypt, madder was used to dye linen cloth red, as can be seen in the tomb paintings and cloth found with mummies. its use spread all throughout the classical world, northern Europe and beyond, right up to the present day. During the Middle Ages, madder became an important crop in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands. The city of Amsterdam became a center for the madder trade. Even with new dye materials arriving from the New World madder was still used, though now frequently combined with other materials like annatto seed or brazilwood in the creation of the very rich scarlet reds that became the most sought after of Renaissance Italy.
The roots of the plant contain a red pigment called alizarin, which gives colors ranging from pinkred and red, orange and burgundy, depending on the conditions used in the dyeing process. It is PH sensitive and will also respond to different amounts of heat used in the process.
To use madder as a dye, the roots must first be dug up and washed, they are then chopped up, soaked in water or a mild acid, like vinegar, and heated to release the pigment. Today, madder is still used as a natural dye, particularly in artisanal and eco-friendly fashion. It is valued for its rich and warm colors and its sustainability, as it is a renewable resource that can be grown and harvested without harming the environment.
Madder is also an ingredient of pigments for painting, including rose madder. |The process to make it is so much fun, I hugely recommend as guaranteed to get you in touch with your inner mad scientist.
woad (Isatis tinctoria)
A slight cheat here, I only have woad extract at the moment, and seeds. I used my woad in a failed attempt at a fermentation bath at a time where having something so stink-laden was not appreciated. So I will try it again when I get some more, far, far away from the house because now I can!
Woad is also a very old source, widely used as a dye and pigment since antiquity, again there are copious examples of its use in Egyptian burial linens and pigments The woad plant grows throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia, and its use as a dye has been strongly associated with the Bronze age, the iron ages and Viking ages. It was particularly popular as a dye and pigment during the medieval period, because it was inexpensive to produce and far more durable than other natural dyes, such as madder or weld. It produces a range of blue shades, from pale sky blue to rich navy. It also was used to produce blue pigments, which were used in the creation of illuminated manuscripts and paintings.
In this case it’s the leaves of the woad plant that are used. They would have been harvested and left to dry and then fermented and shaped into balls. The fermentation required to process woad into dried balls for distribution produced a pungent ammonia odor, unsurprising since the pant is part of the mustard/brassicae family and the fermentation was often done with urine. Fermentation is required to convert the glycoside indican naturally present in the plant to the blue dye indigotin. Then the balls were ground up and soaked, and the precipitate from the fermented leaf solution is mixed with a strong base such as lye to make the pigment powder.
If you were looking for a centre of excellence for Woad it would probably be France; Occitanie was a major woad production centre from the 14th to the 17th century, and Toulouse had already been producing high quality woad dyes, and woad dyed cloth prized for vibrancy and fastness, since the 12th century. Toulouse woad coloured fabric was the blue that clothed the Kings of France.
Despite its popularity, woad production declined during the 17th century as indigo, a blue dye derived from the indigo plant, became more widely available. Indigo was cheaper and easier to produce than woad, and produces far more Indigotin.. The woad plant detoriates soil fertility and took a lot of land, so it was much easier to import Indigo from the Americas, where it was cultivated on a large scale. Indigo is a legume and fixes nitrogen in the soil, as a further benefit.
WELD (Reseda luteola)
Also known as Dyer’s rocket, the third of the Big Three of old and medieval dyes, this one surprised the hell out of me the first time I used it. It produced a watery yellow looking bath of not very much until you added the cloth or wool and soon you could see a strong, almost flourescent looking yellow start to gather. It is definitely eye catchingly yellow, noone is going to miss you in a weld yellow tunic. I have probably remarked many times that when you walk towards a list field at an SCA event the colours are always so inviting and wonderful to see, but it is those who are wearing teh various shades of yellow that really tend to stick outto the modern eye. Most leaf and plant derived dye stuffs produce yellows of various kinds but this one is yellow with a side of yellow.
Again, lots of evidence of weld being used in Ancient Egyptian times, all the way up along. This plant was widely cultivated in Europe, particularly in France, England, and Italy. This plant is a member of the brassicae family and was cultivated for its yellow-green flowers, it had the distinct advantage of thriving in poor soils and waste ground, thus making it an ideal plant for cultivation by peasants who did not have access to fertile land. It’s also a pretty enough plant, with a tall flower spike, I’ve seen a lot more of it in spots that have been made over for biodiversity gardens and the like recently.
It is a good yellow to use to over dye with other colour to make a strong green, and also can be “saddened” with iron to make a green colour.
Left was from a previous attempt a long time ago and photographed in poor light. Below is the more recent attempt at workshop, again doesn’t do the colour justice.
Elderberries (Sambucus)
An example of a fugitive dye, and one that was likely to be widely used by poorer people. It creates a lovely dyebath, smells amazing, looks fantastic as it’s dyeing but gives a sort of disappointing result if you were hoping for a strong colour that doesn’t last very long with too much use though good mordanting does help. It is a pretty sort of light pink purple and is fun to play with so I tend to have some dried berries in stock, as I also use them for pigment making. Since elderberries can be gathered in quantity in the Autumn here it’s an easy one to get and experiment with.
Walnut (Juglans)
Anyone who has followed my SCA blog or my ink making experiments knows I went a bit crazy looking for walnut husks some time back. Not the shells but the green casing the walnuts are covered in on the tree. Walnut trees are not common here in Ireland. I keep dried walnut on me now, both for dyeing and ink making, and they are a useful form of tannin if you need to add some into a mix. Tannin, as you may remember, is what makes a dye substantive – that is, not need a mordant on protein fibres. Anyone who has ever worked with fresh walnuts knows exactly how staining they are and will not be surprised they make a good dye. The husks contain juglone which makes them a stronger dye than the shells and they will produce a really lovely range of browns fading out to beiges and creams with each exhaust bath.
There’s a story that Leonardo da Vinci’s famous brown ink sketches are done in walnut ink, and having made some I do think the colour works, but I haven’t yet tracked down if that is true or not.
Also on the tannin dye side I normally have oak galls (dark browns, greys and blacks with iron) and acron caps (silvery greys) but they are currently packed in my ink making box
Tumeric Curcuma longa
Turmeric is a spice derived from a plant called Curcuma longa, of the ginger family, which is native to Southern Asia. It has been used for thousands of years and has played a significant role in the history of South Asia, particularly in India. The use of turmeric as a dye and pigment dates back to at least 300 BC, and possibly even earlier but didn’t break into Europe as a mainstream dye until mid period or so with the advent of new trade with the Middle East and North Africa. It is the source of the vivid orange yellow of Buddhist monks’ robes. It was widely used all over India and Southeast Asia to create bright yellow, orange and brown colours that were highly prized in textiles, ceramics, leatherwork, paper and other decorative arts. It is PH sensitive, yellower in more acid conditions and browner in akaline. Turmeric’s popularity as a dye and pigment continued to grow in Europe, particularly popular in Italy, but it wasn’t particularly lightfast. It was often used to supplement or replace saffron.
Alkanet (Alkanna tinctoria)
Alkanet is in the borage family also known as dyers’ bugloss, Spanish bugloss, or Languedoc bugloss. It is native to the Mediterranean region and has been used as a dye in that region since antiquity.
Alkanet produces shades of grey, lavender and purple colours and are moderately lightfast.
The trick to making alkanet a really successful dye is not to try to extract the colour with alcohol before adding to the dyebath not with water. ( soak in white wine left over from a party, or really cheap vodka maybe) Otherwise be prepared to soak it in water for a long time, like a week at least, to try to get any strength of colour from it.
It also benefits from at least wool with at least a 15% mordant
Buckthorn or Persian Berries Rhamnus
Important distinction – this picture is of ripe buckthorn berries, these are used to make sap green and Stil de grain yellow pigment and that’s why I have them. The unripe berries are better for dyeing. They do need mordant but then produce a warmer, more golden yellow than weld.
Rhamnus has 140 accepted species, which is great fun when you’re trying to figure out which ones you can use for ink making and dyeing. My experiments continue.
The dyer’s equivalent are known more commonly as Persian berries, and this seems to be agreed to be Rhamnus saxatilis, They are great for over dyeing with woad or indigo for good greens, or over dye it with reds for vibrant oranges.
FLowers
You can use all manner of flowers for dyeing, just remember it’s a fairly huge ratio of flower to wool needed though – I have wanted to try dyeing linen with gorse for some time, as it seems very likely the yellow of an Irish leine would likely benefit far more yellow from the exuberance of gorse blossoming in April and May than from saffron. The last time I worked it out I’d needed 200% the weight of the cloth for a good strong colour. That’s a lot of picking but doable, if I can get past the contact fighting back the plant does. Flowers definitely require mordanting your wool or fabric. In the top row are dried mallow and dried pomegranate flowers and what dyers coreopsis looks like (very common garden plant) Coreopsis is one of my favourite dyes, it produces a lovely golden yellow with alum and gorgeous oranges with soda ash or iron.
Insect derived dyes – lac, Kermes and Cochineal
One of the most expensive of all dyestuffs was the insect dye, kermes (Kermes vermilio) derived from female scale insects that live and parasite on the sap of the kermes oak, Quercus coccifera, found in various parts of the Mediterranean. It’s another properly ancient dyestuff, with extant Egyptian and classical finds. It was extremely expensive in period and was used to make the best scarlets. If you want to make sure your 14th and early 15th century Low Countries, English, French, Italian or Spanish persona is dressed to impress you need to match the color of full grain pure kermes scarlet. It was often called grain in recipes because it was very fine and often mistaken for plant matter. It’s also expensive nowadays so I don’t have it in my stash either. It is the source of “crimson”.
What I do have is lac powder and cochineal. Instead of the just the insect itself, Lac is the resinous secretion of a number of species of lac insects, most commonly Kerria lacca. The 14th century archives of Francesco di Datini in Florence and Prato list lac from India and South-East Asia as a trade item. Lac secretions in their most basic form are called sticklac, this is the combination of the secretion and the stick on which they were left. These have to be crushed and sieved to remove impurities. If making dye insects need to be processed with the sticklac to give strong colour. Otherwise it is then sieved repeatedly, washed repeatedly to to remove stick and insect parts and impurities as is now seedlac. which can be processed into shellac by heat treatment.
Cochineal wasn’t available as a dye until it was brought back from Mexico by the Spanish – it produced a stronger dye and could thus be used in smaller quantities, and so replaced kermes dyes in general use in Europe in the later medieval period. Cochineal Dactylopius coccus is also a scale insect, it produces carmine. It feeds on cacti, and those found on the pads of prickly pear cacti are collected by brushing them off the plants, and dried. It is a very potent dye, producing a range or pinks and reds.
I’m very conscious that I am writing this as a European SCAdian, obviously when I talk about cochineal being a late period dye I mean in Europe, where I am. Cochineal is a very ancient dye in Aztec culture, much newer in European.
Cochineal/carmine was soon discovered to muddy colour with age and exposure to light when used in artist’s pigments, but it took a stronger hold in dye and textile industries where the colour saturation became extremely popular very quickly. . By the 1570s it had become one of the most profitable trades in Europe and by the middle of the 16th Century it was being used all across Europe
NEW WORLD DYES
Obviously cochineal belongs in this category too.
heartwoods
Brazilwood Caesalpinia echinata
I’ve talked about brazilwood on this blog before, again because I use it to make red ink. Before the arrival of Brazilwood from South America Sappanwood, from the heartwood of the tree Caesalpinia sappan, was imported into Europe in the later Middle Ages from India, Ceylon and Java – this was the first “bresil” or “brasil”, so when, at the end of the 15th century, Portugese explorers found a related tree, Caesalpinia echinata, growing in the country now known as Brazil, they named the country “terra de brasil” after the tree and the red dye from Caesalpinia echinata was called brazilwood. The wood produces a lovely vibrant red and was frequently combined with madder to enhance the red colour.
Logwood Haematoxylon
logwood is also called bloodwood tree because of its deep red heartwood, and is in the pea family. It can be found in Central America and the West Indies. The wood is heavy and extremely hard and the most famous ingredient used in truly black dyes. It is PH sensitive. Logwood Dye produces violets, greys & blacks
Fustic or Old fustic Chlorophora tinctoria
Old fustic, or yellowwood, is derived from the heartwood of dyer’s mulberry, a large, tropical American tree (Chlorophora tinctoria, or Maclura tinctoria) of the mulberry family, Moraceae. The dye produces yellows on wool mordanted (fixed) with chromium salts.
Dyeing with heartwood dyes – brazilwood is hard to get because it needs to be ethically sources from sustained forests. With all of these dyes they tend to come as spinters and dust of wood. You need to bring the chips to a boil i water, then soak overnight and carefully keep the dyestuff in a dye bag away from your yarn (ask me how I know) They are not especially lightfast.
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Annatto seeds from the Achiote tree (Bixa orellana) Annatto seeds dye in radiant yellow orange but are not particularly lightfast unless combined with other things. They are also used in food colouring so are very safe if you want to dye with kids. If you combine the dye bath with Cochenial or madder (per the Plinctho) you get excellent reds. This is pretty new to me so I have to do more research and experimentation
Please feel free to ask me if you’re curious about something, or if you want to try one of these at any A&S enabled event.
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