Dyes from the Garden

摘要

Before the 1800s, when synthetic colorants became available, nature provided all the hues needed to dye fabric. Our ancestors were extremely adept at extracting a multitude of colors from natural sources--plant materials, insects, mollusks, minerals,pigmented soils--and they even mastered the use of metallic compounds, or mordants, to pretreat fabric for greater absorption of the dye. Remnants of dyed materials from China, India, South America, and Egypt have revealed bril-liantly colored textiles dating back thousands of years. Yellows, tans, greens, and browns were the easiest colors to produce from herbs, but artifacts show that early civilizations found ways to manufacture blues, reds, and purples, as well.