I'm all excited - the first batch of my embroidery silk in new colours arrived today, dyed lovingly and carefully by my friend and colleague Margit from Alte Künste. And she has managed to dye the most gorgeous yellow I've ever seen.



It's like liquid sunshine. It's like textile gold. It's warm and soft and it's yellow, yellow, yellow.

There's a lovely purple as well - and I have not yet wound off the red and the pink from their skeins into something better storeable and handle-able. Winding silk that fine, I have learned, can be a real challenge if you don't know what you are doing. The skeins, even if handled like raw eggs, tend to tangle a bit during the dyeing process. As this thread is flat silk that has been totally de-gummed, it snatches and tangles easily. My first tries at winding off silk from the skein, years ago, were the total catastrophe. I tried to do that with one of the common four-armed skein holders or swifts. Well. I very quickly found out that there's a reason why Japanese silk swifts have more than four arms... so I did upgrade to a swift with more arms, and that does make a huge difference. It's still a fiddly task. (Weirdly, it's also one that I find very hard to stop. Just past this one snag. Just until the next hitch. Just this one more. Just past this knotty tangle. Oh, is it half past three already? Oops. Well, I can do a few minutes more...)

Once  all the new skeins are wound, I can portion the silk off on the 10 m rolls for the shop, and take photos, and then you'll be able to buy it.

For today, though, I'll sit next to it for a bit longer and go "my preciousssssss"...

If you're interested in learning more about purple mollusc dye but missed the webinar a while ago - the recording of the session is available in the video archive of the American School of Classical Studies, and you can find it here.

There's a lot more things in the archive as well, sorted by category, so if you're into Classical studies, it's probably worth a look and a browse.

In not-so-classical news, I've been very busy sending out distaffs and spindles in preparation for the next online classes, and I'm already looking forward to the next one. If you'd like to join in for the English language one on June 30, there's still a few days left to book: I've set the deadline to June 10 to make sure that the parcel with the kit will definitely arrive in time within Europe. So don't miss it!

There's a webinar on tonight about Murex Purple dye in the Bronze Age Aegean, by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The webinar is via Zoom, it's free to attend (you just need to register), and it starts at 6:00 pm German time.

Read more about the webinar, and register here.

In other news: I'm busy as a bee on amphetamines here, and the weather is finally stable enough for me to fire my spindle whorls! Unfortunately, there's already a few dead ones. The salamanders must have been hungry...

More about the firing, and pictures, are to come. Tomorrow, probably.

If you're interested in dyeing in former times, there's an Archetype Book Talk with Dyes in History and Archaeology editors and contributors on Tuesday 25 May 2021, 3pm BST.

Jo Kirby, Maarten van Bommel, Ilaria Degano and Joanne Dyer will talk about the Dyes in History and Archaeology meetings and books. The talk is free to attend, but you must register via Eventbrite in order to receive the link to participate on Zoom.

Some of the books are also offered at a discount price until 26th May, for 30 instead of 40 GBP. You'll need to use the discount code BOOKTALK at the checkout of the Archetype Books online shop.

The MAMUZ, the museum in Asparn/Zaya in Austria, is preparing an exhibition about experimental archaeology (more about it here, in German). The exhibition will then move on as a wandering exhibition, showing objects from archaeological experiments and explaining the objects, and the experiments, in video clips.

So I've been busy doing video stuff, including the cutting and editing, and doing all the other bits and things necessary to prepare. What ate a lot of time - much more than I had expected - was making a colour sample card as the object to go in there to represent the Pompeii Dyeing Experiment.  This started in 2012 with a first run, and there was an add-on made in 2013, followed by two more runs of the experiment in 2016 and 2018. The aim was to find out how a metal kettle would influence the results of the dyeing process, both due to the presence of metal in the mordanting bath, in the dyeing bath, and in both.



For the exhibition, I wound the samples onto strips of cardboard, grouped by kind (mordant, dye, both) and by metal. Nine turns of the thinner wool, used in 12/13 and 2018, and six turns of the thicker wool used in 2016. All neatly in the same position on each strip...



...and it's amazing how much of brain such a simple task can eat.

My personal main takeaway from this experiment, by the way, is the importance of repetition - plus a much higher appreciation of just how much variation natural materials can introduce, and how much of a role sheer luck plays in even the best controlled experiment.

In the 2012 run, we ended up with a reddish colour on the yarn dyed in the copper and the clean lead kettle - which made a kettle made from lead with an oxide layer on the surface the neutral kettle, very close to the actual control dyed in a glass jar with no metal plate added at all. In the following runs, we were never able to reproduce that reddish colour - apart from the iron, our samples all turned out pretty yellow, and much the same across all kettles. If not for that chance aberration in the first run, we would have thought that there is no real difference between the kettle materials, at least not when using madder or birch leaf as a dye.

I'm actually tempted to run the experiment again next time that the Forum will happen (2021, I'm looking at your autumn with a critical eye!), with weld as a dyestuff instead of birch leaf, and see if results are giving us a clear difference there.

Anyway - the card has been finished, which involved lots of glueing, and the use of some of my bookbinding equipment, and now it will go on its way to Asparn!

[caption id="attachment_5775" align="alignnone" width="169"] Pressing with weights until the glue has set...

There's another EXARC Textile Chat taking place this Saturday at 15:00 Amsterdam time. This month, the topic is "colour" - to brighten up all our days, something very welcome in this rather colourless time of year.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="393"] The image that goes with the Textile Chat session... clicking it should bring you to the event info page.


If you're not familiar with this event yet: It's an informal text chat on the EXARC discord channel, where anyone interested in historical textiles is welcome to join in (or just lurk, if you prefer). You can read more about how to join in on the EXARC website for the event.

Too many tabs open in my browser - you know what that means: Link Post!

I don't know if you know about the more-or-less satirical party "Die Partei" in Germany, but they actually have two people in the EU parliament. Both of them are sort of doing the job of a medieval fool, trying to point out the absurdities and stupidities that nobody else mentions or dares to mention. With varying effect - but who knows, maybe it will change something over time. At least it's a way of keeping updated on things that are happening in the parliament, and on getting a few insights of how stuff works there (or doesn't work).

One of them, Nico Semsrott, now has started a youtube series he calls the "Nico Semsrott Show", explaining stuff. Here's the first episode, in English (to reach more people) with German captions available:


This article about a special blue dye is already a bit older itself, but I found it still interesting - it was used to dye the tassels on prayer shawls, and provided by a species of Murex molluscs.

The melting glaciers in Norway reveal archaeological finds - which is a wonderful source for archaeology, but still feels like a bad thing overall to me. Climate change will kick us all in the ass before long.

Finally, here's a concert titled "The Wool Merchant and The Harp" in the Leeds programme, featuring Leah Stuttard playing the harp.