HSF Challenge #21: Green
When I introduced the first HSF colour challenge (White) I hinted that there would be a second colour challenge this year, and that it would be a little more challenging. The challenge? Green – from palest spring green through to darkest pine green, and from barely-there eu de nil, to vibrant chartreuse. White, I think, is easy: almost every historical costumer has a number of white items, just because for most periods white would be the standard colour for most underthings. Green might be a little harder. It has been used in most periods, and while it’s never been the pre-eminent dye, redolent of status and riches, it’s often been a very expensive desirable colour. Green, for all that it is the colour of nature, is actually a very hard dye to achieve with natural dyes, and for most of history it took a double dye bath (first yellow weld, and then an over-dye of indigo or woad (which is indigo, but that’s another story) to achieve green. Green was complicated to dye, and has …