Textile history!! Woo! For an archaeology class I took I wrote a giant paper on all the natural dyes used in the Ancient Near East, the Levant, and Egypt since they all influenced each other, and these palettes are only a fraction of what could’ve been done. Some of it looks like kermes, def madder and maybe some safflower, and there were a tons of lichens and mosses to use especially in Scotland that I’ve only just started covering. Greys were brobably a mixture of tannins from oak galls and Ferrous sulphate/acetate/iron, since black is not a natural color produced by plants. Black walnuts get pretty close when the FE percentage is upped, but when logwood started coming out of America people jumped on it because it gave a natural purple-black (though it is not lightfast at all, and faded to a violet like the next day. People would dye their cloth with a dark indigo and then dye it with logwood for a more lightfast color, but it still faded to a purplish color relatively quickly). Woad (isatis tinctoria) was the primary blue dye used at the time because of its abundance in Europe, I’d be interested to see the trade routes at the time to see if Indigo (indigofera tinctoria) was used as well at the time since cotton and other materials were being traded with India as early as 700 BCE by the Persians and Phoenicians. Natural dyes are so beautiful and harmonic, the color varieties are endless with the multitudes of combinations and the strength of the dye.

reblog to save a liFE