HERB - dyes

[Katherine Blackthorne]

----Original Message Follows----
From: Kathleen Keeler <kkeeler at unlserve.unl.edu>

Re: dyes
   <Snip of excellent commentary on blue/purple dyes>

Some of this sound familiar -- I think I read it in a "Creative Anachronist" 
article a couple years back.  Excellent article, if anyone still has it.


>Top of the line, as you said, were the murex purples from the 
>Mediterranean.  Huge numbers of animals were killed for very small amounts 
>of these precious  dyes.  The technology was available from Roman times on, 
>but apparently strongly controlled due to its profitability, eventually 
>ending up in the hands of the Byzantines.  When Byzantium fell to the Turks 
>in ?1480's?, this industry
and its technical secrets were lost (tho I think we can now recreate it).

>Madder can make a decent red, and a number of American plants like 
>brazilwood (Brazil was named for the dyeplant, not vice versa) and bixa and 
>the coccineal beetles, added viable reds after 1492.

Now, I'd thought ghe coccineal beetles *were* the tiny mediterranean 
creature that produced red.  Thank you for clarifying!

>Logwood from the Americas made the first really good black.  The Spaniards 
>were showing off their dyestuffs by wearing black.

I take it "logwood" is a south/Central American goodie?

Agnes
Mag Mor, Calontir
PS. language is a real pain in this:  the names of colors aren't uniform.  
Last
week, we had a speaker who works on bird camouflage mention in passing that 
the
color that North Americans (Canada and US) call scarlet is called "royal
purple" in the UK today (the color of the coats of guards at Buckingham
Palace).  So you can see how royal purple can be produced by madder (madder 
was
the historic dye for the British Red Coats), but madder doesn't make 
(American)
purple.  American purple, you know, the color of concord grapes,  purple. 
Wow,
its even hard to think what Thing I should refer to to be clear. How about
"Minnesota Vikings purple" ?


At work the other day, we were trying to figure out which item was 
"lavender" colored.  One co-worker insisted it must be item a, because 
"that's more of a lilac color, and lilac is the same color as lavender."  
(Where I grew up, we had white, pink, and lilac colored lilacs!)

Gotta love it!
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at 
http://profiles.msn.com.

============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.