If you're looking at medieval embroideries, you will, sooner or later, stumble across one that has been embellished with pearls. Seed pearls. As in tiny, miniscule specimens of pearls, smaller than anything you will easily get today. (Or get at all, in some cases.)

A while ago, I was looking for a source for pearls to do embroidery medieval style, but to no avail. The company that I found which in theory offered small pearls (with a diameter of 1 to 1.5 mm, as that's the size we're talking about) told me, on my inquiry, that they don't have pearls that small at all, and if they had, nobody would be able to drill a hole into them.

That was done, however. I'm wondering, together with a lot of other people, how medieval and early modern and modern people managed to drill holes into pearls so small that it seems you can hardly see them. With techniques possible in the Middle Ages...

To give you an idea of the tinyness of these things, compare the size of these seed pearls to the size of the modern glass-headed pin:

They are utterly, utterly tiny, and if anyone has an idea of how the holes might have gotten into these pearls, or how they may have been strung up, or sewn to a textile (these haven't, of course, but others did) they would be more than welcome! 

A while ago I wrote about dyeing silk and different outcomes, depending on whether it had been degummed or not. My degumming try that I referenced back in that post ended up being not completely successful, as some of the gum had still stayed in. 

I finally got around to doing it again, with a fresh sample, and this time I made sure to steep it to death, or something very close - it stayed in the hot soapy bath for a full hour, and I used de-ionised water to avoid any hindrance by our rather hard tap water. 

And here's the result:

As you can see, there's four samples now. The one on the bottom is the silk dyed in the gum, the one on top is untwisted degummed embroidery silk dyed together with the gummy silk. On the small roll in the middle, the bottom one is the outcome of my last trial, partly degummed, and on top is the completely degummed silk. 

It's become very light in colour, even lighter than the silk that was degummed before dyeing. I had expected something like that - either a bit lighter, or somewhere around the colour of the embroidery silk. 

There is definitely more shine now, but it is also much more delicate; I've had several snaggy bits even though it's a twisted silk. 

So my current conclusions are:

If you want to work with silk that has next to no twist at all, leaving it gummy or partly gummy might be a good idea to up the stability. The sericin also seems to take natural dyes much better, so if you want to have really deep, vivid colours... leaving it gummy or partly gummy is, again, your friend. In case you want it to be utterly shiny, though, degumming is the way to go.

Though I had the impression that the thin strands of gummy silk, with about 20 den, are also looking quite shiny. More exploration might be necessary...