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Color It Plaid

© Ann Garner

Each fiber used in traditional cloth-making has its own natural range of hues, though linen, cotton and silk tend to be in the ivory to beige range while wool can be snow-white even without bleaching and range through the neutrals to pure black. White wool and silk were the easiest early fabrics for dyeing with mineral or plant-derived pigments. Silk has never been widely available for ordinary folk, so our discussion will concentrate on the coloration of white wool.

White sheep's wool has a natural affinity for dyes of all kinds, acid dyes being kinder to the fibers than alkaline ones. Sea animals from a certain location in the Mediterranean provided the purple pigmentation for the royal robes; the madder root gave brilliant rose to dark muddy brown and the indigo plant offered a dull blue color for garments and household furnishings. For more brilliant blues, copper ore could be placed in solution with the wool and an agent to react with the copper and a bright aquamarine was the result. The most prized blue pigment was finely ground lapis lazuli to make a deep royal blue if the textile maker knew the proper dyeing techniques.

As time passed, cotton and linen in their natural or bleached pigmentation provided those who lived in Northern latitudes with undergarments and their "good white shirts," while wool was dyed, usually after it was spun into yarn. So long as women of a household had the responsibility of providing clothing and household textiles for the family, the spinning and dyeing of yarn was "custom-tailored" to specific textile fabrication, depending on whether daughters needed new wool jumpers or baby needed a new blanket. The yarn for the blanket might differ in gauge, in softness and in coloration from the yarn for the jumpers.

One of the most interesting ways of creating colored fabric is to dye wool yarns that will be used in repetitive patterns both in the warp (background length of cloth) and the weft (the horizontal threads of the cloth). This weaving technique produces a distinctive textile design called plaid. The most famous of all plaids is the tartan plaids of Scotland. They were traditionally woven in plain weave, the weft going over 2 threads of the warp and then under 2 threads throughout the length of the cloth and the number of threads per inch remaining constant. See a photo of a warp set up for weaving tartan plaid cloth at The Tartan Lady's web site at http://www.island.net/~estuary/weave.htm. Scrolling down the page will show what the finished cloth looks like.

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