I remember a friend talking about dyeing the exactly right color for a
historic camel saddle cloth from Afghanistan, a brilliant red that
resisted duplication, until *somebody* figured out they had used camel
urine for the mordant.
Yeh, they had to go collect some.
== Marjorie Wilser
=:=:=:Three Toad Press:=:=:=
"Learn to laugh at yourself and you will never lack for amusement." --MW
http://3toad.blogspot.com/
On Feb 1, 2011, at 8:06 PM, Ann Catelli wrote:
Indigo-the-dye-molecule is the main coloring matter extracted from
indigo-the-plant and from woad-the-plant.
Blue jeans fade, not due to any problems with indigo, but because
their blue threads are dipped very quickly into the dye bath & out
again, so their coloring is all on the outside.
Like an indigo 'O' in cross-section.
If a dowel is painted, and its outsides sanded down, it is no fault
of the paint that the dowel color shows.
Ann in CT
--- On Tue, 2/1/11, annbw...@aol.com <annbw...@aol.com> wrote:
The dyestuff in woad is chemically
very similar (in fact, it might be
identical, but I can't verify that off-hand) to that in
indigo, but woad
doesn't contain as much, and, naturally enough, European
woad dyers resisted the
"new fangled" indigo. Both woad and indigo are vat
dyes--the blue dyestuff
is not water soluble, a real drawback in dyeing, and has to
be treated with
a strong reducing agent to make it water
soluble. The baths smell bad
partly because guess what the strong base was back in
the day--stale urine.
Although I understand stale urine doesn't smell like the
fresh stuff. The
fiber/fabric is dipped in the bath, and, as it comes out
and hits the air,
the dyestuff is re-oxidized and turns blue.
Blue jeans run mainly because there is excess dye left on
the surface of
the fabric that is not absorbed into the yarns/fibers.
Ann Wass
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