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Natural Dyes
Until the late nineteenth century only natural dyes were used for coloring weaving yarns. Natural dyes include plant dyes, animal dyes, and mineral dyes.
Plant dyes come from roots, flowers, leaves, fruit, and bark of plants. Woad, a plant of the mustard family, and indigo, a bush from the pea family, are used for blue dye.
Yellow is produced from saffron, safflower, sumac, turmeric, onionskin, rhubarb, weld, and fustic. Madder has been used since ancient times for reds. Redwood and Brazilwood are also used for reds. Browns and blacks come from catechu dye, oak bark, oak galls, acorn husks, tea, and walnut husks. Henna is used for orange. For green, indigo over-dyed with any of a variety of yellow dyes is used.
Some animal sources of dyes include insects such as Cochineal, found on cacti in Mexico; Lac, a wild version of Cochineal, found in India and Iran; and Kermes, found on Oak trees near the Mediterranean. All three produce a range of reds. Kermes was used in Europe, and Lac in Egypt and Persia until Cochineal, the cheapest of all three, gradually took their place. Kermes, the most ancient of all three, has been used even before the 16th century.
Mineral dyes come from ocher (yellow, brown, red), limestone or lime (white), manganese (black), cinnabar and lead oxide (red), azurite and lapis lazuli (blue), and malachite (green).
Dyers are able to get a variety of colors and shades from the same source depending on the type of material used, the characteristic of local water, and the use of different mordants. For example, from pomegranate skin they can produce a range of colors from red to black by using different mordants. Also, as with a painter's palette, all the primary natural colors employed could be mixed to produce a wide variety of secondary hues. Today, natural dyes are still used in some traditional dye-houses and villages where natural sources are readily accessible.
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Synthetic Dyes
In the mid-nineteenth century, as the demand for handmade rugs increased in the West, their production increased in the East. The need for easy-to-use and less expensive dyes with wider range of colors caused the development of synthetic dyes in Europe and especially in Germany. Synthetic dyes were soon imported to Persia (Iran), Anatolia (Turkey), and other Eastern countries. The first synthetic dye, Fuchsine (a magenta aniline), was developed in the 1850s. Shortly after, other synthetic aniline dyes followed. Synthetic aniline dyes made from coal tar were brilliant, inexpensive, and easy to use; however, they faded rapidly with exposure to light and water. In 1903 Nasser-e-Din Shah, the Persian king of Qajar Dynasty, banned the use of aniline dyes in Iran. Persian weavers discontinued the use of synthetic dyes until the modern synthetic chrome dyes were developed in the years between the First and the Second World Wars. Chrome dyes are colorfast (any dye that retains its intensity despite exposure to light and water), and are produced in an infinite variety of attractive colors and shades.
Today, mostly chrome synthetic dyes are used for coloring weaving yarns. Natural dyes are used in places where they are easily obtainable. Sometimes the two are combined together in the same rug, and the weavers use the best type of dye available to them. In some cases they can find good quality dyes in nature, and in other cases they get better results from the synthetic dyes.
We could be confident that today whether we buy a rug made from natural or synthetic dyes, it will only improve with time. Even rugs made with aniline dyes in the late 19th century are valuable today because of their age.
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