Blanket Dye Recipe

[PanzerJager]

I found this going through period newspapers, I thought it would be of interest to the forum.

NATCHEZ DAILY COURIER, September 20, 1861

"Recipe for Coloring Blankets. Make a strong solution of Red Oak Bark, put a table spoonful of Copperas in the solution, boil a few minutes and stir well. Put your white blankets in the solution and boil them half an hour; take them out and soak them in weak ley (lye?) then rinse them well in warm soap suds and hang out to dry. These directions if followed will give a most desirable for an army blanket."

[Spinster]

Re: Blanket Dye Recipe

soak them in weak ley (lye?) then rinse them well in warm soap suds and hang out to dry. "

Hope springs eternal--and those attempting this receipt would certainly hope that weak ley was a reference to lye.

However, it is more likely a shortened reference to chamber ley--in other words, urine.

In addition to its famed uses in gunpowder production in the wartime South, urine has a much longer history in the dye industry as an after bath, reducer, fixative or color changer for many natural dyes.

The final rinse of soap suds does more than kill the smell-- the alkaline base serves to neuturalize both the uric acid in the chamberley and the tannic acid in the red oak bark.

While the normal color range expected here would normally be varying shades of rich brown, especially given the Copperas mordant, we had a rather remarkable variant of that in our fall dye run 2 years ago.

Red Oak bark, simmered in an iron pot with Copperas mordant, on wool produced a remarkable poison green with the first day's dyeing. Day two the pot was allowed to cool overnight, and reheated with no change---cotton and linen items entered on day two emerged a throughly unremarkable, and totally expected brown.