Page:Arts & Crafts Essays.djvu/403

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Colour.

to scarlet. On cotton and linen all imaginable shades of red, according to the process."[1] Of the shades into which red enters, avoid over-abundant use of warm orange or scarlet, which are the more valuable (especially the latter) the more sparingly used; there is a dusky orange and a faint clear bricky scarlet, sometimes met with in old work, that do not need this reservation, being quiet colours of impure yet beautiful tone. Clear, full yellow, fine in itself, also loses its value if too plentifully used, or lacking due relief by other colours. The pure colour is neither reddish and hot in tone, nor greenish and sickly. It is very abundant, for example, in Persian silk embroidery, also in Chinese, and again in Spanish and Italian work of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The best and most permanent yellow dye, especially

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  1. William Morris, "Dyeing as an Art."