Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal
signs=.
D'Appligny was changed to D'Apligny.
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Page 132: a "Note" was anchored, and added to the footnote sequence.
Inconsistent punctuation and capitalization of lists, chapter headings,
and footnotes was retained.
The listed Errata were corrected.
A BOOK ON
VEGETABLE
DYES
BY
ETHEL M. MAIRET
A.D. 1916
PUBLISHED BY DOUGLAS PEPLER
AT THE HAMPSHIRE HOUSE
WORKSHOPS HAMMERSMITH W
Price 5s. net.
_PRINTED by DOUGLAS PEPLER
at
DITCHLING in the COUNTY of SUSSEX
& PUBLISHED BY HIM AT
THE HAMPSHIRE HOUSE WORKSHOPS
HAMMERSMITH
ON S. JOHN THE BAPTIST'S DAY
A.D. MDCCCCXVI_
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
IN PRINCIPIO ERAT VERBUM
ET VERBUM ERAT APUD DEUM
ET DEUS ERAT VERBUM.
_Sc. Joannem_ 1.1.
VIDITQUE DEUS CUNCTA QUÆ
FECERAT: ET ERANT VALDE BONA.
_Genesis._ 1.31.
MAN uses these good things, and when MAN first discovers how to make
anything, that thing which he makes is good.
For example: this book is printed upon one of the first iron presses
to be made in this country. The press is a good press; it would be
difficult to make a press which would enable the printer to print more
clearly. The wooden press was a good press & the printing from it has
not been surpassed.
Further, this quality of goodness of a first discovery may persist for
many years.
But there is a tendency to avoid _Quality Street_. We are choosing
rather _Quantity Street_ & the Bye paths of _Facility & Cleverness_;
we have become accustomed to the hum of the _Time & Labour saving_
machinery; and we are in danger of forgetting the use of good things:
indeed the tradition & practice of goodness has been lost in a
considerable number of trades.
For instance: a carpenter has become so used to buying his timber in
planks from a yard that he has nearly forgotten its relation to the
tree. The man who works to designs conceived by somebody else with
wood sawn by another man's machine must be deprived of the natural
strength of the tree.
And this is not an exception to, but an example of, the way we are
choosing to do things.
It is impossible to buy linen as good as that normally used by every
tradesman in the XVIII century. It is nearly impossible to get cloth,
paper, bread, beer, bacon and leather equal to that in common use 150
years ago.
IN VIEW OF THE BEGINNING it is desirable to record what still survives
of the traditions of making good things; and I shall endeavour to
publish the instructions & advice of men & women who still follow
these good traditions.
Douglas Pepler.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. WOOL, SILK, COTTON AND LINEN 11
III. MORDANTS 24
IV. BRITISH DYE PLANTS 37
V. THE LICHEN DYES 45
VI. BLUE 63
VII. RED 87
VIII. YELLOW 107
IX. BROWN AND BLACK 122
X. GREEN 133
CHAPTER I.
Dyeing has almost ceased to exist as a traditional art. In this 20th
century the importance of colour in our lives seems to be realized
less and less. It has been forgotten that strong and beautiful colour,
such as used to abound in all every day things, is an essential to the
full joy of life. A sort of fear or nervousness of bright colour is
one of the features of our age, it is especially evident in the things
we wear.
There is unfortunately good reason for it. We fear bright colour
because our modern colours are bad, and they are bad because the
tradition of dyeing has been broken. The chemist has invaded the
domain of the dyer, driven him out and taken over his business, with
the result that ugly colour has become the rule for the first time in
the history of mankind. It is not that chemists never produce
beautiful colour. Dyeing as a chemical science has not been studied
for the last 50 years without producing good results. But there is
this great difference between the chemical commercial dyes and the
traditional dyes--that with the commercial dyes it is very easy to
produce ugly colours, the beautiful colour is rare; but with
traditional dyes it is difficult to make an ugly colour, and good
colour is the rule.
It was in 1856 that mauve was produced from coal tar by an English
chemist, and this began a new era in dyeing. The discovery was
developed in Germany, and the result was the creation of a science of
chemical colouring.
The advantages of the new colours were ease and simplicity of use,
general reliability with regard to strength and composition, and
certainty in reproducing the same colour again without trouble. With
regard to fastness, to light and to washing there is practically
little difference between the two. It is more the method by which they
are dyed and not the dye itself (although of course in some cases
this is not so) that determines their fastness. The natural dyes are
more trouble and take longer time to prepare. Chemical colours can be
dyed now as fast as the natural colours, although at first this could
not be done. Some of the chemical colours as well as the natural, are
not fast to light and washing, and ought never to be used; but there
are natural colours, such as madder, some of the lichens, catechu
etc., which are as fast as any chemical dye, if not more so. BUT there
is this general difference between the results of the two
methods,--that when a chemical colour fades it becomes a different
colour and generally a bad one: when a natural colour fades, it
becomes a lighter tone of the same colour.
Since the middle of the 19th century our colour sense has been getting
rude shocks. At first came the hideous aniline colours, crude and
ugly, and people said, "How wonderful, are they really made out of
coal!" They were told to like them and they did, and admired the
chemists who made them. Then came more discoveries, and colour began
to go to the opposite extreme, and the fashion was muddy
indeterminate colours--'art' colours as they were called, just as
remote from pure good colouring in one direction as the early aniline
colours were in the other. We are now emerging from the mud colours,
as I would call them, to the period of the brilliant colouring of the
Futurist. Here we have scientific colouring used with real skill. The
Futurist has perhaps indicated a possible way in which chemical
colours may be used by the artist and is teaching people the value of
simple combinations of brilliant colour.
And yet do they satisfy the artist? Are they as beautiful as the
colours in a Persian Khelim? Is there a blue in the world as fine as
the blue in a Bokhara rug, or a red to touch the red of a Persian
brocade or Indian silk?--the new fresh colours as they come out of the
dyer's vat, not as they are after years of wear and tear, though that
is beautiful enough. And yet they are not more beautiful than the
colours once made by dyers in England. They are as brilliant as the
chemical colours, but they are not hard and unsympathetic and
correct. They are alive and varied, holding the light as no chemical
colour can hold it; and they are beautiful from their birth to their
old age, when they mellow, one with the other, into a blend of
richness that has never yet been got by the chemical dyer and never
will be.
Perhaps it is the scientific method that kills the imagination.
Dealing with exactly known quantities, and striving for precise
uniformity, the chemist has no use for the accidents and
irregularities which the artist's imagination seizes and which the
traditional worker well knew how to use.
William Morris says that "all degradation of art veils itself in the
semblance of an intellectual advance," and nothing is truer than this
with regard to the art of dyeing. As a tradition it is practically
dead in Britain, and is threatened with gradual extinction all over
the world. It will not recover itself as an art till individual
artists set themselves to make beautiful colours again, and ignore the
colour made for them by commerce and the chemists.
Handicraft workers should make their own colours. Leather workers
should dye their own leather, the embroiderers their own silks and
wools, the basket makers their own materials, the weavers and spinners
their own flax, cotton and wool; and until they do this the best work
will not be done. This is the necessity for the present. _If any craft
worker wants sound colour he must make it for himself, he cannot get
it done for him by artists._ The hope for the future is that dyeing
may be reinstated as a craft, co-operating with the other crafts and
practiced by craftsmen.
The way to beauty is not by the broad and easy road; it is along
difficult and adventurous paths. Every piece of craft work should be
an adventure. It cannot be an adventure if commerce steps in and says
"I will dye all your yarn for you; you will always then be able to
match your colour again; there need be no variation; every skein shall
be as all the others; you can order so many pounds of such a number
and you can get it by return of post; and you can have six or seven
hundred shades to choose from." It is all so easy, so temptingly
easy,--but how DULL! the deadly yards of stuff all so even and so
exactly dyed; so perfect that the commerce-ridden person says, "this
is almost as good as the stuff you can buy in a shop, it is as perfect
as machine made stuff."
What would have been the use of all this to the great colourists of
the world, the ancient Egyptians, the mediæval Italians or the great
Oriental dyers? They could not get six hundred shades to order; six
was more like their range, they did not need more, and in those they
could not command precise uniformity. They knew that the slight
variations caused by natural human methods add to the beauty and
interest of a thing, and that a few good colours are worth any number
of indifferent ones.
It is quite certain that a great many of the handicrafts that have
depended upon commercial dyes would produce _infinitely better work_
if they dyed their raw material themselves.
It may be objected that life is not long enough; but the handicrafts
are out to create more life, not out to produce quantity nor to save
time.
The aim of commerce is material gain; the aim of the crafts is to make
life, and no trouble must be spared to reach that end. It must always
be before the craft worker. Dyeing is an art; the moment science
dominates it, it is an art no longer, and the craftsman must go back
to the time before science touched it, and begin all over again.
The tradition is nearly lost in England.
It lingers in a few places in Scotland and Ireland. In Norway, Russia,
Central Asia, India and other places where science has not entered too
much into the life of the people, it is still practiced. Is dyeing as
a tradition to be doomed, as traditional weaving was doomed? Yes,
unless it be consciously studied again and remade into an art.
This book is intended for the use of craftsmen and others who are
trying to dye their materials by hand and on a small scale.
Information and recipes, useful to such workers, are to be found in
books and pamphlets dating onwards from the 17th century, and in this
book I have drawn largely upon these sources of dyeing knowledge, as
well as upon the traditions still followed by present workers, and
upon the experience of my own work.
All dyeing recipes, however, should guide rather than rule the worker;
they are better applied with imagination and experience than with the
slavishness of minute imitation. Every dyer should keep a record of
his experiments, for this will become invaluable as it grows, and as
one thing is learnt from another. The ideal way of working is not by a
too rigid accuracy nor by loose guess-work, but by the way which
practice has proved best: nevertheless, some of the greatest dyers
have done their work by rule-of-thumb methods just as others have
certainly worked with systematic exactness.
The dyer, like any other artist, is free to find his own methods,
subject to the requirements of good and permanent craftsmanship,
provided that he achieves the effects at which he aims. But it is
supremely important that he should aim at the right effects; or,
rather, at the use of the right materials, for if these are right the
effects may safely be left to take care of themselves. In order to
develop the taste and temperament of a good colourist, it is necessary
to use good colour and to live with good colour. In this book I
attempt to show where good colour can be obtained. But one may begin
to live with good colour which has been found by others.
This part of the dyer's education is not prohibitively costly, even in
these days of inferior colour. Indian and Persian embroideries are
still to be obtained, though care must be taken in their selection, as
most modern pieces are dyed with chemical dyes and are very ugly.
Persian Khelim rugs are cheap and often of the most beautiful colours.
Russian embroideries and woven stuffs, both old and new, are
obtainable, and are good in colour, as are most of the embroideries
and weavings of Eastern Europe and the East. What are popularly known
as "coffee towels" are often embroidered in the finest coloured silks.
Bokhara rugs and embroideries are still to be purchased, and many of
the weavings of the far East, although, alas, very few of the modern
ones are of good colour. I would say to dyers, do not be satisfied
with seeing beautiful coloured stuffs in museums. It is possible still
to get them, and to live with a piece of good colour is of much more
use than occasional hours spent in museums.