Adding Cochineal Dye to Starch for 16th C. Ruffs
Thanks to the enraged Protestants of the 16th Century, we know that the great ruffs of that era were dyed a rainbow of colors. According to Philip Stubbes, in his lengthy (and hilarious) polemic The Anatomie of Abuses the great monstrous Ruffes were "of all colours and hewes, as White, Redde, Blewe, Purple, and the like."
When I initially contemplated adding color to my starch I was thinking blue or yellow because those were common - blue using smalt or yellow using saffron (particularly in the early 17th Century if the frothy climax of Protestant indignation over the saffron dyed ruffs peaking around 1620 is any indication). And yet every time I talked about it with people invariably the thing people wanted to see was pink or purple ruffs. Me too!
So I went with cochineal, a New World equivalent being chemically identical to kermes, the dye made of Mediterranean bugs which it began replacing in the 16th century. I know that (soon-to-be-Mistress) Crespine back East has experimented with vermillion, but as far as I know I'm the only one who has tried cochineal.
Method:
Ok, instead of telling about how to do it WRONG, which is what I did the first time, I'll skip the "don't do this" part and just tell you how it went when it worked out well.
1. Mix up a batch of starch like normal, with a couple of changes: This time I used a ratio of 8 cups of water to 3/4 cup of wheat starch, to reduce the thickness and therefore blotchiness factor. And, I added the cochineal BEFORE straining the starch, because the dye has a tendency to have little grains that don't dissolve that I didn't want on my ruff. I used a teaspoon of cochineal powder. It is very strong, you don't need much!
2. Work the starch into the ruff by hand. I can't stress this enough. When I'm not adding color I just dunk the ruff into the pan of starch and hang it to dry, but when color is part of the show you have to be very careful and work the starch around by hand to get it good and even.
3. Hang to dry. It's a good idea to keep a close watch on it to keep the folds from sticking together and to keep working the starch into the fabric to keep it even. This was part of the work of the laundresses back in the 16th Century, constant care of the ruffs to make the color even. I may not have spent quite as much time at this as I should have...
4. Set. You've seen how I set before. This time I tried a new type of setting. The pleats at the collar are 1-inch pleats, but I set the edges in 3-inch pleats. This is clearly a setting technique I'm going to need some practice with.
This would have been a vastly better result had I acquired a decent goffering iron at some point over the last 6 months but...I didn't. Better luck next time. I did, however, learn one neat trick from a fellow named Noel Gieleghem, who posts regularly on the Elizabethan Costuming forum over on the Facebook (and who is, far as I can tell, a god among ruff-makers), which is to run a thread along the middle of the pleats to aid in the ironing. This made the process SO much easier, and I've left the thread in until I'm ready to wear the ruff.
This result is my second attempt. My first attempt was a complete and total disaster, so I washed it out and started over. I can say, based on that experience, that this dye does mostly wash out using a bit of Woolite and elbow grease in the bathroom sink. Most of the work I did on getting the color out from that disastrous first run was scraping off clumps of starch with a fingernail in a sinkful of water. I'm positive that if I spent more time it would have completely come out, so I do think that the dye is not going into the fabric itself but is bound to the starch. The areas I scraped were completely white after that epic washing.
When I initially contemplated adding color to my starch I was thinking blue or yellow because those were common - blue using smalt or yellow using saffron (particularly in the early 17th Century if the frothy climax of Protestant indignation over the saffron dyed ruffs peaking around 1620 is any indication). And yet every time I talked about it with people invariably the thing people wanted to see was pink or purple ruffs. Me too!
So I went with cochineal, a New World equivalent being chemically identical to kermes, the dye made of Mediterranean bugs which it began replacing in the 16th century. I know that (soon-to-be-Mistress) Crespine back East has experimented with vermillion, but as far as I know I'm the only one who has tried cochineal.
Method:
Ok, instead of telling about how to do it WRONG, which is what I did the first time, I'll skip the "don't do this" part and just tell you how it went when it worked out well.
1. Mix up a batch of starch like normal, with a couple of changes: This time I used a ratio of 8 cups of water to 3/4 cup of wheat starch, to reduce the thickness and therefore blotchiness factor. And, I added the cochineal BEFORE straining the starch, because the dye has a tendency to have little grains that don't dissolve that I didn't want on my ruff. I used a teaspoon of cochineal powder. It is very strong, you don't need much!
2. Work the starch into the ruff by hand. I can't stress this enough. When I'm not adding color I just dunk the ruff into the pan of starch and hang it to dry, but when color is part of the show you have to be very careful and work the starch around by hand to get it good and even.
3. Hang to dry. It's a good idea to keep a close watch on it to keep the folds from sticking together and to keep working the starch into the fabric to keep it even. This was part of the work of the laundresses back in the 16th Century, constant care of the ruffs to make the color even. I may not have spent quite as much time at this as I should have...
4. Set. You've seen how I set before. This time I tried a new type of setting. The pleats at the collar are 1-inch pleats, but I set the edges in 3-inch pleats. This is clearly a setting technique I'm going to need some practice with.
This would have been a vastly better result had I acquired a decent goffering iron at some point over the last 6 months but...I didn't. Better luck next time. I did, however, learn one neat trick from a fellow named Noel Gieleghem, who posts regularly on the Elizabethan Costuming forum over on the Facebook (and who is, far as I can tell, a god among ruff-makers), which is to run a thread along the middle of the pleats to aid in the ironing. This made the process SO much easier, and I've left the thread in until I'm ready to wear the ruff.
This result is my second attempt. My first attempt was a complete and total disaster, so I washed it out and started over. I can say, based on that experience, that this dye does mostly wash out using a bit of Woolite and elbow grease in the bathroom sink. Most of the work I did on getting the color out from that disastrous first run was scraping off clumps of starch with a fingernail in a sinkful of water. I'm positive that if I spent more time it would have completely come out, so I do think that the dye is not going into the fabric itself but is bound to the starch. The areas I scraped were completely white after that epic washing.