And I thought milking a cow was hard.....
Sharon C.
-----Original Message-----
From: h-costume-boun...@indra.com [mailto:h-costume-boun...@indra.com] On
Behalf Of Marjorie Wilser
Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 8:11 PM
To: Historical Costume
Subject: Re: [h-cost] his blue coat
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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