#i also still have my dye samples and my notes from my fashion history class so like. open invitation to ask me questions about this

[drinking-paintwater]

hi hi hi!!! i’m not a natural dye expert by any means but i have experience working with it and i LOVE yapping about natural dye and historical fashion so. this post is really buzzing around my brain. i'm so so sorry for the absolutely incoherent rant i'm about to subject you to. (obviously this is just me and my experiences with dye processes talking. again. not the expert.)

(under a read more because good god i'm just yapping away here.)

first off, can i throw another contender in the ring for what color is Irene's Color™?? consider. indigo!! indigo is a natural dye that gives a beautiful blue, very deep and very rich. it's perfect for irene's hood-cloak-thing. HOWEVER. assuming your ru'an is based off of europe, you run into a similar-ish problem with tyrian purple, in that it is probably inaccessible to the average person---it would probably be imported into ru'an. perhaps from tu'la, which would have very interesting implications as to the relationship between tu'la and ru'an, and perceptions of the ru'anians who use indigo, especially after the tu'la invasion should you keep that in your rewrite. (maybe it could be a compromise between woad and tyrian purple?? perhaps??)

and that brings me to another thing!! what dye plants grow in ru'an and where? because that is a very important question that affects what colors your characters have access to. you can absolutely have naturally dyed greens and pinks. that is a thing that CAN exist with natural dye---i have seen it and i have done it---but it is dependent on what plants exist and where they're growing, like the indigo plant that i've mentioned.

assuming, again, that ru'an = europe. they would have access to madder (red) and weld (yellow---very bright yellow). disclaimer, my experience with naturally dyed green is with indigo. i've never worked with woad before. BUT. in theory. you should be able to dye something in weld and then dye it again in woad to get green. it's a slightly different process with indigo but that particular dye may or may not even be available in metelli anyways, so it doesn't really matter.

although. tangent about green in medieval-and-renaissance-ish europe. it was a wealthy people color, as you have to essentially dye the material twice when using natural dye. it was a way to flaunt your wealth without breaking sumptuary laws, which were established because the nobility really didn't like the new money tradesmen now being able to afford to "dress above their station" aka dress like the nobility. (i could go on about sumptuary laws but they essentially limited who could wear what and how much of a given material someone could use. like silk---you can only wear so much silk in your outfit if you aren't noble or whatever.) of course you don't have to use sumptuary laws, but i do think the implications of laurance (and cadenza) wearing green in this context would be fascinating.

okay so. about my claim that you can get naturally dyed pink. abandon all hopes of, like, hot pink at the door. BUT. a super light percentage of madder will give you, like, different shades of salmon pink. super pretty!! (you can find a picture of these pinks here https://blog.bindandfold.com/?p=570.)

see, when you dye something, the amount of time you have it in the dye bath doesn't typically matter? all that really matters is that you give the dye enough time to bond to the fiber you're dying, which is typically an hour (if you take out your fiber before the dye has enough time to bond to it, your color will fade. i have made this mistake. major bummer). what really matters is the WOF---the weight of fiber, or the percentage of dye material compared to the weight of the material you want dyed.

basically i would put less madder in my dye bath if i was trying to make pink, and more madder if i was trying to make a solid red, but both dye baths would need to sit for an hour to be colorfast and not fade.

also!! exhaust baths!! another way to get a lighter color (like pink)!! see, sometimes when you have a dye bath, there will still be dye particles leftover after you've run your first bath and taken your material out. you can (usually) still use this dye. you just put new fiber into it, and bam. we call this an exhaust bath---because the dye is "exhausted" . exhaust baths are always going to be lighter than the first bath, since they had less dye than the one that preceeded them. so long as the remaining dye particles have enough time to bond with the fiber, an exhuast bath should be just as colorfast as the first try. i've been able to get like, two or three dye baths out of the same pot of dye before. it works.

okay. i think that's all that i have in my brain. also i have definitely yapped on long enough. hope this was helpful!! good luck with your rewrite!!👍👍

when i’m trying to use a more plausible color scheme for everyone in my MCD rewrite (since it’s going to be set in a more underdeveloped time period, a lot of colors are going to be expensive/hard to find) and can’t decide what colors to give certain people 😭

im obviously gonna keep some of the original colors in the beginning (like Lord Burt wearing red because of its significance as a powerful color), but keep everyone’s else’s mostly plain. for example Nana won’t be an explosion of pink (although it will remain her favorite color), Aphmau won’t be wearing purple as often (the most common variation of the color was tyrian purple which took a very extensive amount of labor to make even one gram of the pigment. that, as well as the color being reserved for royalty), and Laurance won’t have as many green articles of clothing in the section of my rewrite portraying season two (the emerald green pigment was made from arsenic, which made it not only extremely toxic to produce but to wear as well as the skin would absorb the poison)

(i’m still debating about Dante and Garroth with their blue tones because it was a more common color amongst the poor people and was made with cheap, low quality dye, but Louis IX and Henry VIII started wearing it with other nobles and it became a color of high standing so…)

now this is also where I also come to a standstill because of these colors and what they used to represent. each Divine Warrior will have a color associated with them, which is where part of their symbolism will come from. however, I’m stuck on what color to give Irene

there’s a very brief clip somewhere I can’t remember when it appeared, but Irene was wearing a black two piece that seemed to be torn. I imagine this being something like her “first” outfit in the world so i’m not too worried about that one, but I’m more concerned about the one she wears when she’s portrayed

we see Irene wearing two cloaks from what I remember (my memory is garbage and I have yet to reach that far in anything). one of her cloaks was royal blue and the other is a lilac purple. the lilac purple would be a more difficult hue to achieve in the time period i’m reaching for, so either way i’m going to make the purple into a deeper shade.

i’m having such a war in my head about which color to choose for her, though. because both colors could signify who she is and i’m honestly debating just having different people give her different colors but I don’t know

on one hand, tyrian purple was a color reserved for royalty. using it could be used to show the high regard in which people in Ru’aun placed her. it could be used to signify their desire to have Irene rule as queen over the region before she diminished the monarchy and developed the Lord system instead. however, this color was made from a tiring process that required extensive amount of labor for barely anything to show the effort, and I feel as though the way to obtain the color doesn’t represent Irene the Matron

on the other hand, I feel as though a deeper blue pigment would be a better match. blue was original worn by peasants but the steady popularity it gained with nobility made it a more expensive and luxurious color for people that could afford it, as I previously said. this color I feel would fit better with her character to show that Irene came from humble beginnings and was put on a pedestal after her efforts for peace and becoming Lord of Scaleswind (which would be equal to blue becoming a color of nobility). the only problem with the blue is that the dye used by the peasants was low quality made from the woad plant that (from what i’ve seen) was dyed much lighter compared to the royal blue i’m talking about. i don’t know, maybe she got an upgrade at some point…

(can you tell i love the history behind colors)

(also if anyone has any other impactful information concerning colors please let me know i also actually love learning about it)

(and greatest apologies guys this is basically a yap post it has very little significance to anything)