A Brief Stroll Through History as Fabric is Dyed Red

When folks became interested in creating different colors of fabric, processes were developed for yarn dying and vat dying.

Yarn dying is when the yarn or thread is dyed before it is woven into a fabric. Using two or three different colors of thread can produce a pattern in the fabric, such as a plaid or stripe. Today, we call fabric woven in that manner “homespun.”

Vat dying is when an entire bolt of fabric is dunked into a big tub (or vat) full of dye.

madder plant
The roots of madder, also known as Rubia tinctorum, were used as red dye.

The first dyes were made from natural materials – insects, plants, shellfish, and minerals. The most important red dyes used in the 18th and 19th centuries in the US were made from madder and cochineal.

As amazing as it is, madder is a beautiful green plant with a yellow flower, whose root causes fabric to become red.

Cochineal is a bug that infests cactus. The red mass can be used to dye fabrics a beautiful red.

Cochineal is a bug that infests cactus. The bug itself is white and looks kind of fluffy on the flat leaves of cactus in Mexico and evergreen trees in the Mediterranean.

Just after the female has given birth to her tiny nymphs, she secrets a mass of red fluids to protect her young.

Cochineal dye is extremely expensive, as 70,000 insects yield just 1 pound of dye. And it produces beautiful crimsons, pinks and scarlets. Try as they might, European dyers could not produce a red as bright and colorfast as the dyers in the Middle East.

Because the process for dying Turkey red was so long and complicated, separate dying factories were set up just for dying Turkey red fabric. Still today, nobody knows exactly how the Turks accomplished the original process.

Gradually natural dyes were replaced with synthetic dyes, beginning in 1810.

Interestingly while a German scientist named, Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf developed a synthetic green dye, a French chemist named Daniel Koechlin-Schouch developed a synthetic Turkey red.

Even until 1910, cochineal was used commercially because the synthetic substitute, alizarin, was not as colorfast. Eventually, though the cost and predictability of supply caused alizarin to replace cochineal and madder.

Other natural dyestuffs that produced red included: brazilwood, pokeberry, alkanet, annatto, lac and safflower. However none of these were colorfast (they washed out or faded with time).

Happy Quilting!

Penny is a quilter of more than 24 years who seeks to interest new quilters and provide them with the resources necessary to create beautiful quilts.

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