Color in textiles is produced by dyeing, by printing, or by painting. Before the
nineteenth century, all dyes were derived from vegetable or, more rarely, animal or mineral
Sources.
Since madder plants could be grown practically everywhere, the roots of some
species of the madder plant family were used from the earliest period to produce a whole
range of reds. Red animal dyes, derived from certain species of scale insects, were also
highly valued from ancient times through the Middle Ages. Blue were obtained from indigo,
which was widely cultivated in India and exported from there, and from
woad, a plant common in Europe and also used in the Near East from the beginning of the
Christian era. Before the first, nonfading "solid" green was invented in the early nineteenth
century, greens were achieved by the over-dyeing or overpainting of yellow and blue.
However, yellow dyes, which from weld or some other plant source such as saffron or
turmeric, invariably fade or disappear. The accounts for the bluish tinge of what were once
bright greens in for example, woven tapestry.
The range of natural colors was hugely expanded and, indeed, superseded by the
chemical dyes developed during the eighteen hundreds. By 1900 a complete range of
synthetic colors had been developed, many of them reaching a standard of resistance to
fading from exposure to light and to washing that greatly exceeded that of natural dyestuffs.
Since then, the petroleum industry has added many new chemicals, and
from these other types of dyestuffs have been developed. Much of the research in dyes
was stimulated by the peculiarities of some of the new synthetic fibers, acetate rayon, for
example, seemed at first to have no
affinity for dyes and a new range of dyes had to be
developed; nylon and Terylene presented similar problem.
The printing of textiles has involved a number of distinct methods. With the
exception of printing patterns directly onto the cloth, whether by block, roller or screen,
all of these are based on dyeing: that is, the immersion of the fabric in a dye bath.