Quilting’s Shady Past

Betrayal.

Spying.

Industrial espionage.

Bribes.

And just plain “flat-out stealing” as my paternal grandmother would say.

If you think I’m describing the next John Clancy book, you’re wrong.  I’m describing the early world of quilting…more or less.

To understand the history of quilting, you must have a foundational knowledge in textile production.  Part of that knowledge is understanding the chemical process of dying fabric and how valuable that was.  Were quilters directly involved in this shady side of quilting?  Probably not, unless their husbands were involved in textile production.  Did they benefit from it?  Absolutely. 

And before any of my United States readers clutch their pearls and murmur, “Not us again,” no, it wasn’t us.  This was strictly a European tryst.  While the United States grew plenty of cotton and spun it into thread, we didn’t begin weaving any cotton thread into cloth (with the exception of home looms) until the late 18^th Century.  It seems England had some serous issues with us knowing how to weave our own fabric.  While they were happy to buy our cotton, and even our spun thread, they made it illegal for anyone in England to teach Americans how to weave fabric on industrial looms or share the process via letters or drawings.  It took an English immigrant, Samual Slater, to break the weaving bottleneck in 1790.

The fight between England, France, Turkey, and India took place long before then, and it was more about dyes than fabric manufacturing.

But I’m getting a little ahead of the story.   For as long as there has been fabric, people have wanted to change its color.  Regular cotton thread woven into material produces a beige-ish color material.  People – from garment makers to quilters – longed for color and contrast.  At the start of the colorless-to-colorful journey there were natural dyes.  Flowers, vegetables, and roots were used to produce a variety of natural dyes to color fabric.  These worked fairly well, but they did have a couple of problematic characteristics.  First, natural dyes were not colorfast.  They would fade over time and as a result of washing.  Second, natural dyes weren’t consistent.  Sure, a batch of onion skins may result in a lovely yellow color, but one batch of fabric dyed with onion skins may slightly (or not so slightly) differ from another batch of fabric dyed with them.  Fabric manufacturers wanted consistency.  They wanted ease.  They wanted beautifully dyed fabric. 

And they wanted it cheap.

This could only be developed through the use of synthetic dyes – dyes produced in a chemistry lab and not from the kitchen.  This finally happened on August 26, 1856.  William Henry Perkins was working in a chemistry lab at the Royal College of Chemistry over the Christmas holidays.  His boss had given him a task:  Find a synthetic form of quinine.  Quinine was an essential medicine in the treatment of malaria, which was usually deadly.  The natural form of quinine was difficult and costly to extract.  If a synthetic form could be found, it could be produced in abundance at a much lower cost, leading to more lives saved from the deadly disease.  Perkins was conducting experiments with aniline, a colorless, odorless oil derived from coal tar – which was also found in abundance.  Through the process of the experiments, he oxidized the aniline by using potassium dichromate.  This produced a black substance that, when the black color was removed,  dyed silk purple. 

Boom.  The first synthetic dye was produced.  Perkins called the color mauve and named the synthetic dye mauvine.  He filed for a patent and mauvine became one of the first synthetic dyes to become mass produced.

Purple is a lovely color.  It’s one of my favorites.  But what the textile industry really wanted was a bright, clear red and green.  Green was the one color that, despite leaves, grass, and a hundred other green plants, could not be produced well by a natural dye.  Cloth had to be dyed blue and then dyed yellow over top of the blue to produce green.  This green was typically called over dyed green because it was dyed twice.   However, the process showed issues over time.  If you look at some antique red and green quilts, sometimes the areas which should be a deep green – such as vines, leaves, and stems – have faded into a light tan or khaki color, blue, or a lime green.  The over dyed greens didn’t last.

But red… it seemed as if every fabric manufacturer wanted a bright, clear red.   No matter what they had to do get it.  Pay exorbitant sums.  Steal trade secrets.  Kidnap dyers.  No deed was too shady, and no price was too high.

For years, the color Turkey Red ruled the roost (see I made a poultry joke there).  It was the Pantone color of several decades.   No other color has influenced both garment and quilt making more than this color.  Everyone wanted cloth in the bright, cherry red.

The problem with Turkey Red (which is named after the country of Turkey, not the Thanksgiving centerpiece), is its  unique dying process, which was long and costly.  The fabric production of this red began in India and moved west to the region around Turkey and Greece known as the Levant.  The complex dying process could involve as many as 17 steps, with many steps repeated multiple times.  Until the process was refined, it could take as many as 25 days to produce this color on cotton fabrics.  This is one “recipe” for the dye:

1. Boil cotton in lye of Barilla or wood ash

2. Wash and dry

3. Steep in a liquor of Barilla ash or soda plus sheep’s dung and olive oil

4. Rinse, let stand 12 hours, dry

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 three times.

6. Steep in a fresh liquor of Barilla ash or soda, sheep’s dung, olive oil and white argol (potassium tartrate).

7. Rinse and dry

8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 three times.

9. Treat with gall nut solution

10. Wash and dry

11. Repeat steps 9 and 10 once.

12. Treat with a solution of alum, or alum mixed with ashes and Saccharum Saturni (lead acetate).

13. Dry, wash, dry.

14. Madder once or twice with Turkey madder to which a little sheep’s blood is added.

15. Wash

16. Boil in a lye made of soda ash or the dung liquor

17. Wash and dry.

I know Halloween is long gone, but somehow I feel if you threw in Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog, no one in the dye house would be surprised.  And reading it makes you incredibly thankful for synthetic dyes because there is no way OSHA or anyone else would allow red fabric to be made this way.  However, one interesting thought to tuck away is this: Turkey Red was color fast.  Some of today’s red fabric, even made with the best synthetic dye, is not.

As gross as the “recipe” is (and this is not the only formula for Turkey Red fabric dye), these dye methods were closely and religiously guarded by those involved.  Overall, the 17^th century European palate was drab and faded.  The brightness of a red was deeply coveted by dye makers, but the Europeans knew it would be hard to obtain the formula.  They could either A) Keep testing their own theories until they stumbled on the right formula, or B) Discover the existing formula for Turkey Red.

They opted for option B.  And they would do just about anything to get it.  Spies were sent to Levant to learn about the tedious, time-consuming dying process.  Unfortunately for the spies, things did not work out too well.  Europe had to continue to import red yarn from Turkey and red fabric from India through the first half of the 18^th century. 

Finally in 1747 the French had had enough.  They enticed bribed dyers from Greece to teach them the Turkey Red dying process.  Once the recipe was revealed, Europeans could successfully dye yarn the bright, clear red color.  Only the Europeans took things up a notch – they added alizarin (taken from the root of the Madder plant) and used chemical alum to fix the dye.  They threw those two ingredients in with the regular Turkey Red recipe.  Along with these improvements, they also discovered they could produce a much brighter, consistently red fabric if they dyed the yarns and then wove the yarns into fabric instead of weaving the fabric and then dying it.  By 1765, woven Turkey Red cloth production was in full swing in France, England, Scotland, and Holland.  By the 19^th century, they also had developed a way to dye fabric Turkey Red and keep a consistent color.

When Turkey Red Was Not Enough

For a while, solid red fabric was great.  Everybody in Europe (and by this time America) was in love with it.  Besides, printing anything on this fabric seemed virtually impossible, as the oils used in the dying process would not allow additional dyes to penetrate the cloth.  In 1810, Daniel Kochelin, a textile printer from Mulhouse, France, developed a method to discharge print on Turkey Red.  He bleached out the red color in a certain motif and replaced the bleached color with black or blue, and eventually yellow.  By 1815, multiple color prints on Turkey Red were available. 

These printed red fabrics were a huge hit throughout the European region and were seen in garments and household linens.  Manufacturers in England, France, and Scotland began to export both solid and printed Turkey Red fabric to the United States, Africa, and the Middle East.  England and Scotland also exported the fabric to India.  By the early 1830’s, exports of the cloth to the United States were almost nonstop.  Boatloads of solid and printed Turkey Red fabrics arrived in American ports, and they were quickly consumed.  Quiltmakers, dressmakers, and the home sewist fell in love with the vivid and colorfast quality and were willing to pay a premium for the bright red fabrics.  Quilters especially loved the small-scale floral and geometric prints and used them primarily in applique.  By 1840, red and white quilts were all the rage and this trend lasted for about 40 years.

By 1868, a synthetic version of the alizarin Turkey Red dye was invented, which lowered the price of the fabric and ushered in a second craze of Turkey red and white quilt making.  Respective to quilters in their own regions, European textile manufacturers also catered specifically to the quilting market by printing whole cloth panels and “cheater” cloth patchwork fabric motifs in the last half of the 19^th century.   

In the early 20^th century, an even less costly synthetic Turkey Red dye was available around the same time that the color’s use in quilts expanded to include embroidery work comprised of subjects (such as Sunbonnet Sue) and signatures with red thread on white fabric.    Used in various motifs and techniques, Turkey Red and white remained a popular color combination among quilt makers throughout the early 20th century. 

It’s Not Easy Being Green (Apologies to Kermit the Frog)

Green dye has a history even worse (to a degree) than Turkey Red.  A clear, bright green dye was just as much desired as a red one.  And while nature abounds with green, a natural green dye wasn’t pretty, nor was it colorfast.  In the Middle Ages, leaves and berries were used and the chlorophyll they produced gave a muddy green color, but it wasn’t colorfast at all.  Eventually these early dyers came upon the Rubber Ratbrush and used the bark from this plant along with stinging nettle to make a reasonably better green dye, but it would still fade with time, exposure to light, and washing. 

Somewhere around the 16^th century, dyers decided to forgo looking for a green dye and instead rely on what they knew – if you mixed blue and yellow, you got green.  So at first they would dye the fabric blue and then dye it a second time with yellow (thus the name overdyed greens).  Eventually dyers came up the formula of Prussian Blue and Chrome yellow.  Those two dyes produced a bright green, however depending on how colorfast the blue or yellow was, the fabric could fade to either a tannish hue or lime green.

It wasn’t until 1778 that the Swedish chemist Karle Scheele developed a synthetic green dye, but it used copper arsenic as part of the formula.  The green was very popular – it could be found in everything from paint to wallpaper to fabric – but as with all things arsenic, it was very poisonous.  As more people became sick (and some died), the deaths and sickness were traced back to Scheele’s green.  Most of this green has been destroyed, but some larger museums with a textile preservation division still may have a few of the garments.  Green largely fell out of favor until the 1930’s and 1940’s and by then a non-poisonous, synthetic green dye was discovered. 

To be fair to Scheele —  fabric, wallpaper, and paint, did use his arsenic dye.  However the real culprit in the deaths attributed to his green were bakers, confectioners, and bartenders who used the green color in food and drink production.  One confectioner made a batch of lozenges using Scheele’s green that killed 15 people.  And other synthetic dyes also used arsenic in their production, but not the large amount needed to produce green. 

What Did This Mean to American Quilt Making?

Strangely enough, American dyers and fabric producers never really jumped on board of the Turkey Red train.  They were content to import those goods from Europe, primarily Scotland, until after the Civil War, and Turkey Red remained a popular color with quilters until about 1940. 

By the end of the 19^th century, Paris Green had replaced Scheele’s green, but it was equally as poisonous.  This green was banned in 1960.  Today we use Pigment Green 7, 50, and 36.  All three of these greens have a variety of toxins, but they’re not quite as harmful as the Paris or Scheele’s green.  As far as fabrics go, manufacturers can use natural, vegetable dyes, but the issues with those remain the same as the Middle Ages – they’re not colorfast and they fade.  Fabric producers are more likely to use an acid, sulfur, or reactive dye, which are, overall, pretty safe.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little trip into the “shadier” side of fabric and quilt making.  Chances are, as you’re pulling fabric for you next quilt, you never think of fabric production as cutthroat or full of espionage.  But back then, even as now, corporate proprietary secrets are kept under lock and key. 

And protected by (almost) any means necessary.

Until Next Week…

Love and Stitches,

Sherri and Felix