Important: Safety Warning
This page directs the use of hazardous substances — such as benzine, gasoline, lye, or strong acids — for household tasks. These materials are highly flammable, corrosive, or poisonous, and the practices described have caused fires, burns, and poisonings.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Dyeing
Take a sufficient quantity of Brazil-wood, sumach, bark, madder, and copperas, and sadden, according to the shade required.
To Remove the Stain of Light Colors from the Hands.
Wash the hands in soap and water in which some pearlash is dissolved, or wash in a paste of chloride of lime.
To Dye Black Cloth Green.
Clean the cloth well with bullock's gall and water, and rinse in warm water; then make a copper full of river water, boiling hot, and take from 1 to 1 lbs. of fustic; put it in, and boil it 20 minutes, to which add a lump of alum of the size of a walnut; when this is dissolved in the copper, put in the coat, and boil it 20 minutes; then take it out, and add a small wineglass, three parts full, of chemic blue, and boil again from an hour to 1 hour, and the cloth will be a beautiful dark-green; then wash out and dry. To Dye Cotton with Coal-tar Colors.
The cotton is soaked in a decoction of galls, sumach, or other astringent matter, for an hour or two, then passed into a weak solution of stannate of soda, and worked in it for about an hour. It is then wrung out in a dilute acid liquor and rinsed in water. Cotton thus prepared is of a pale yellow color. The stannate of soda may be applied before the tannin, or alum may be substituted for it. The prepared cotton is immersed in a bath of the color slightly acidulated and worked. It will absorb all the coloring matter in time, leaving the bath colorless. Picric and rosalic acids are not adapted for dyeing cotton.