Using Herbs as Dye -- 18th-century Garden Techniques

Hi, I'm Max Hamrick from the spinning, weaving, and dyeing shop at Colonial Williamsburg. We make the cloth that we need at Colonial Williamsburg that modern man doesn't make anymore. One of our side trades is dyeing, which was an apprentice trade in the 18th century. I have a table full of dyes here that are professional dyes as opposed to being folk art dyes. Most of them are plants, the exception being cochineal, which is a South American insect. I'm told it takes 70,000 dried insects to make a pound of red dye. It is also the most expensive dye in the 18th century. I have alkanet here, and the bark of the root of the alkanet plant gives us shades of brown when cooked in water. If you work it in an alcohol base, it's going to give you shades of basically red and purple, sort of a reddish purple put together. The seed of the annatto plant gives us a buttery yellow, and what I have here are junks of indigo made by allowing plant leaves from the indigo plant to ferment. Enough indigo there to do a pair of stockings blue for everybody in Colonial Williamsburg. We did grow some indigo in Virginia in the 18th century. The root of the matter plant that English brought with him gives you shades of orange, and in a 27-month three-step process, you can do almost reds with it, and of course, good old-fashioned browns done with walnuts falling out of trees and hitting you in the head. If you've ever picked up walnuts and gotten a stain on your hands, that indeed is the dye. Fustic. It's the long root that grows across the ground under the fustic bush called a rhizome. Ground up, it gives you really nice shades of yellow. Logwood. The heartwood of the campeche tree. A country named after Campeche for a while, and then of course the Bay of Campeche. Logwood readily available in Virginia to professional dyers. Brazilwood. Again, a country named because there were so many of the Brazilwood trees there. Gives you red, but it's spurious. It doesn't stay red in sunlight. So you can look like you're worth a million pounds for a while. Almost like cochineal, but it's going to go bad on you if you add another color. Our local tree, sassafras. The bark of the sassafras tree, not the root the tea is made out of, gave you shades of sort of a beige. A spice from India called turmeric from a plant gave us yellows. And oak bark, and the bark of almost any tree, will give us shades of brown or yellow depending on how you prepare it. In the 18th century, the English used many tree barks like shumac and hemlock and other things. It is their policy here that if you can't eat it, we don't touch it. So we don't work with those things that are toxic here in Colonial Williamsburg today. Just a handful of colors that we can do with 18th century dyes. Each dye is prepared entirely differently. Each dye has a different recipe. The yarn you're looking at here, the outer yarn, the big skein, the bright one, is wool. And the inner skein is linen. They're both prepared exactly the same way to give you an idea of the difference between the way a plant dye here and an animal dye here take the dye. Each of these, with the exception of the walnut and the indigo, has gone through a process called mordanting. Mordanting is a French word which means to bite. And a mordant is a metal salt, usually alum, potassium aluminum sulfate. It will attach itself to the molecule of the substance to be dyed, and then the dye will attach itself to that molecule. So we need to start to do a yellow dye kettle or a purple dye kettle. It takes us about seven working days to get everything together to be able to do that. For everything but indigo, it's a timed dyeing, like an Easter egg. You put it in and leave it. Take it out. If it's purple enough, good. If it's not, put it back in and put some more dye on it. So each one requires a little different setup and a little different time, and that was part of what you had to learn in your apprenticeship to be a dye.