This is the first post about dyeing and fabric research (and also: I got behind on these so hey! book’s up!) I’ll have another post on some research issues, not to mention proper book announcement posts, when I’m not tired and bleary, but first, the “basics of non-synthetic fabric dyeing” post.
The process of researching for this book meant reading about the history of fabric and dyeing. When I read about the history of fabric there were…some surprising issues with finding reliable sources (more on that in another post). Putting together one more-reliable source and another, I started to get a sense of what the context of fabric dyeing would be like in a quasi-medieval fantasy world.
Facts about specific dyes made it into the book, but I have material (ha) for a post because most of the Fabric Dyeing 101 info I learned did not.
Dyeing linen requires a pre-soak in a mordant, which comes from the Latin for “bite.” When working with a dye that isn’t substantive, mordant is necessary to allow the dye to chemically bond with the fabric–the historical term comes from the conceptualization that the mordant allowed the dye to bite into the fabric.
What is a substantive dye? Essentially, a dye that doesn’t require a mordant (sorry). “Dye that doesn’t require a mordant” is really the definition as much as anything else–a substantive dye is a chemical compound that has been prepared so that it is able to bond directly with the fabric (a well-known historical example is indigo).
Measuring dye, at least today, is a percentage of the weight of the fabric being dyed (WOF). As one might expect, WOF varies the color saturation: dye at a lower WOF can produce pale hues while higher WOF will produce more saturated hues. A more counterintuitive aspect of dyeing, at least to someone like me with no experience working with dyes, is that a dye bath with more dye is not always the best way to get to a desired shade. Instead, some dyes work better with multiple dips into the same dye bath.
I first read about WOF, multiple dips, and most of the information I learned about specific dyes and the process of dyeing from Quilt Alchemy: A High-Country Guide to Natural Dyeing and Making Heirloom Quilts from Scratch by Sara Larson Buscaglia. This book avoided the accuracy issues I was having with general-interest historical books, and I’m really happy I came across this one at my library. This is a book I will come back to if I ever try dyeing fabric in real life, and although I have some differences of opinion with the author about the modern fabric ecosystem I deeply appreciated her thoughtfulness and rigor.
As a penultimate dye fact, dye can have a smell. The famous Tyrian purple, made from sea snails, smelled terrible. I haven’t smelled cutch (or Tyrian purple) for myself, but according to Quilt Alchemy and many other sources cutch dye smells sweet or syrupy during the dyeing process.
Cutch comes from the wood of the Senegalia catechu tree, steeped to produce a tea-like fluid that is dried to produce the dye–one of the dye facts that did make it into my book. Although I had my narrator talking about the colors cutch can produce by itself (pinks, orange-browns, and red-browns), it can also be overdyed with indigo, bringing us ’round to a closing dye fact: overdyeing. Since the method for each natural substance used as a dye is different , natural dyes can’t just be mixed into the same dye bath. Instead, fabric is dipped into multiple dye baths to combine colors.
(The existence of overdyeing is why sea snails were not “the only way to get purple” in the ancient world, a modern myth sort of “fun fact” that always seemed off to me. Can’t you get purple by mixing red and blue? Turns out: yup.)
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