The Colors of Quilts

by Steffani McChesney

I love quilts. I love everything about quilts. But best of all, I love the colors of quilts. Nowadays quilt fabric comes in so many colors there aren’t even names for them all. Of course, the vast color selection available today is due to modern chemical technology, but what did our ancestors do when they wanted some color in their life? Nature provided a storehouse of materials to create colored fabric, some of them pretty weird.

Cochineal was used from pre-Colombian times right up to the 1870s. This dye was made from the crushed bodies of insects, which live in burrows in the prickly pear cactus found in Mexico and Central and South America. Only the females are used. The bugs were dried in the sun, ground into a powder and mixed with water to provide a deep rich red color. Cochineal was so valued by the Spanish that a pound was worth a pound of gold. The Spanish began growing the prickly pear cactus as a home for the bugs on the Canary Islands to have a cheaper source for the dye. During the American Revolution the red coats of the British soldiers were dyed with cochineal. By the 1870s synthetic dyes were discovered to make a colorfast red dye that was cheaper to produce.

Another more ancient red dye was processed from the madder plant, which is related to the coffee plant and the quinine plant. Madder comes from the roots, which are washed, dried and crushed into a powder. After being applied to the fabric a mordant, or fixative, is needed to keep the fabric from fading. The popular red color known as Turkey red used in early redwork was made from the madder plant. Turkey red appears in many quilts made in the early 1800s. Its use went the way of cochineal in the 1870s.

The first blue dye used in Europe was made from the leaves of the woad plant. These leaves were dried, crushed and mixed with water to make a paste, which could be applied to just about anything, including people. Roman accounts describe the ancient Britons (the word means painted man) as being covered with blue paint as they went into battle. Woad was used for centuries until the introduction of indigo from India at the end of the Middle Ages. This new dye was called the Devil’s Dye by the European manufacturers because it was less expensive to produce and much more colorfast, thus destroying the market for woad.

Indigo was known from the southern Mediterranean to Asia for centuries. The dark blue color is derived from the leaflets and branches of the plant, which are fermented, purified and pressed into bricks for use. Indigo plantations appeared in the American colonies as early as the 1700s in the South. Production continued into the early 1900s. Blue and white indigo prints made using a resist process like batik were popular and can be found in quilts made during this time. Adolf von Bayer (of Bayer aspirin fame) discovered the molecular structure of indigo in 1905 for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. This process was used to produce synthetic indigo dye.

The most prized color in the ancient world was purple. The first known manufacture of the dye was in the city of Tyre in the Phoenician empire. The dye was made from a small sea snail that lived along the shore. To gather the color the snail had to be crushed and a small vein extracted from its head. The contents of the vein was spread on silk or linen and allowed to dry in the sun where the color changed from a light green to blue to purple. It is estimated that it took 8,500 snails to make only one gram of dye. That’s why purple has always been known as the color of royalty. They are the only ones who could afford it.