Purple Cottons: Chemistry & Quality

 

Faded grapes. Surely, they were once purple.

We've been looking at purple in July in our 6KIA Facebook group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/6knowitalls

Kris Dreissen posted details of a top with different purples fading in different ways.

The seaweed stripe may have been engineered to fade in rainbow shades of brown.

The small ditsy print's spotting to brown was not planned but typical. 

We looked at purple silks and wools. Purple dyes in animal fibers has been well documented in books about coal-tar, synthetic dyes. See Simon Garfield's Mauve.

Purple in the cellulosic fiber cotton, hasn't the same drama or documentation. Here's a review of our discussion about madder purple cottons:

For centuries dyers have known how to obtain a variety of colors depending on the 

metal salt mordants used with madder. root...

...from purples on the left to reds and browns.

The problem with purple cotton prints is they faded. 

One mill had a reputation for the best purples: Thomas Hoyle & Sons' Mayfield Printworks in Manchester, England.

Collection of the Manchester School of Art

"Hoyle's Lilac" 

In our Facebook posts British chemist and seamstress Carolyn Gibbs considered the causes, information expanded upon here. See her site where she teaches techniques and history. 

https://www.carolyngibbsquilts.co.uk/

 Hoyle's printworks were in Mayfield.

Mayfield Print Works

Mayfield, once a separate town, is now part of Manchester

The Victoria & Albert Museum has a scrap of a printed plaid Hoyle's Lilac (1810-1815) with  identification stamp in the selvage. Their photo is flipped.

https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O318603/textile-thomas-hoyle-and/

The Cartwright Quilt from the British Quilters Guild Collection, About 1860.

https://quiltmuseum.org.uk/collections/heritage/cartwright-hexagon-coverlet.html

Variations in purple prints are abundant in British quilts, indicating

how many scraps of lilac from Hoyle's or other mills were leftover from garment making. 

In class-conscious Britain a subdued purple calico was considered the

appropriate garment for those in the lower orders, particularly servants and the poor.

Servant Hannah Cullwick's dress was probably a print in a muted shade of purple. Advice in 1860 for dressing a poor family: "The elder girl would require three frocks...Hoyle's lilac prints are the best."

What made Hoyle's purple prints best? Reporter George Dodd told us of all the steps he observed in obtaining a purple cotton at the Mayfield Printworks.

Dodd glided over several steps telling us merely that the stripe was "soaped" and the floral "cleared." Few details indeed, but it is apparently in these details that Hoyle's obtained their famous fade-resistant best seller. Carolyn was pleased to find a reference to the quality of the soap in William Crookes 1882 book Dyeing and Tissue Printing.

"The soap used must be exceedingly neutral. That used by the celebrated firm of Thomas Hoyle and Co., of Manchester, consisted of the best curd soap remelted with palm-oil, and to this simple expedient their well- known success in the production of madder-purples was mainly due."

Collector Lenna DeMarco posted her quilt from about 1850-1875 with a strange fading pattern. The center field is pieced of typical album blocks in a double pink print. The quilt is quite large for the time---94" x 98". Alternate setting squares are a double purple print, the style we might call Hoyle's Purple even though we do not know which mill printed it. Hard to see the tiny figures but it looks like a typical allover pattern of darker purple lines suggesting a floral.

The unusual fading effect: The border applique has consistently faded more than the setting squares of the same print. The first thought: The border was subject to a different amount of light which has an effect on these purples. One often sees a faded border where the sunshine hits the quilt through the window daily. But this border has faded in similar fashion on all four sides. 

Carolyn Gibbs' remarks on seeing Lenna's quilt: "Very Strange." And indeed it is.

So what has happened??? It may be that the prints are identical but one is a pirated version of the other made by a different mill or perhaps the copyright ran out on the original and the design was in the public domain. Or we are seeing two dye lots, varied runs of the same print, maybe both from the same mill but printed on different days and under different supervision.

And using different soap.

British Quilters Guild Collection

Thanks, Carolyn, for the careful reading and analysis.