How can I make dyes out of just the general reagents available in an ordinary chemistry lab?
Message: I am suppose to make a project for chemistry in which I am supposed to make dye out of general reagents available in an ordinary lab. Could you help? I remember a series of labs in my advanced chemistry class in high school in which, if I recall correctly, we used toluene to make nitrobenzene, which we then used to make aniline. The final step was to use our products to make dyes, presumably azo dyes. It was great fun. In my case, I selected the blue dye option, but made some slight error and ended up with green. We mordanted cotton shirts with alum and then dyed them with the dyes we had made, but, as none of us knew anything about dyeing at the time, all of the dyes washed out the first time they were laundered. I remember that just a tiny amount of color remained in my shirt, enough to make it look dirty, but not to give it any real color. A very old chemistry lab manual, William Simon’s 1898 Manual of Chemistry, A Guide to Lectures and Laboratory Work for Beginners in Chem
