The madder vat in February

Madder gives red from the root of Rubia tinctorum, and it is fussy in a way that reactive dye is not. Too hot and the red goes brick and dull; too fast a rise and it is uneven. The vat is brought up slowly over three hours and held below a simmer, and in a cold shed in February that takes most of a morning.

The water matters as well. Ours is soft off the moor, which pushes the colour towards scarlet; hard water and a little chalk take it towards a deeper garnet. Neither is wrong, but they are not the same, and no amount of standing over the vat makes February’s lot identical to August’s.

So we treat a naturally dyed lot as a date, not just a colour, and we say so at the quotation. If your scheme has to match in two years, buy the whole quantity now or accept a shift of half a tone. Customers who understand this get something a synthetic cannot give them: a red with depth in it, because madder is not one dye molecule but several, and they do not all sit on the fibre in the same place.