Well, the plan for the Madder Baselines is about done - the rest of the planning will have to be done as soon as we know how many samples there will be to handle, and then go for a last check through the long list of steps - before following them through to, hopefully, a nicely colourful end.

Meanwhile I have a second template to turn into a plan and protocol: the template for a mordanting experiment. Common Horsetail is said to contain quite a bit of alum, so it is in theory a replacement for mineral alum which may not have been available everywhere. However, it's not really clear if the horsetail is really suitable for this, mostly because there's no recipe that tells us about amounts necessary, or if there was any other preparation done before using it. Or at least I have not been able to find any...

So the idea was to try out if the plant will work as a mordant, and if yes, how much of it is needed. Because even if it's available, if you need ten times the amount of wool weight to have enough alum, well... that would mean 10 kg of the dried plant for a single kilo of wool, and if you've ever woven fabric, you know that a kilo is a puny amount.

I can think of three different methods of using the plant straight away: as it is (just dried, then soaked, and maybe boiled a bit previously to better get out the contents), fermented, or (which would also reduce the bulk of it) burnt to ashes (which should still contain the metal, though maybe in a different form). 

Obviously, the burning and the using as is do not need extra prep time, but the fermenting does. I'm happy to report that the 100 g of plant that I put into 7 litres of rain water are doing what they are supposed to be doing: Making bubbles and working on changing their smell.

It's not an unpleasant smell (at least not yet), but it is definitely much different from the smell it had at the start (like dried horsetail, but thank you, Captain Obvious). I'm very, very curious already to find out how (or if!) all this will work!

Planning an experiment is like planning a reconstruction - it's really, really easy to forget something. Where something can be a minor detail or, if one is a bit unlucky, something that seems like a minor detail at first but turns out to be rather crucial. 

 I've also found, in the number of experiments that I've either run, or co-run, or been somehow a part of, that it is quite easy to forget that one had planned to make photos at a specific point, or that something has to be changed and this all results in a number of hectic notes that are scribbled somewhere.

Part of that is just business as usual. Not every experiment runs as planned, and sometimes adjustments have to be made on the fly. But I found that good prep is really helpful... and that having a good template for the planning makes the good prep easier.

I've recently updated the experiment planning template on the Textile Forum website, and if you're interested, you can find it here. In case you are using it, please let me know if you have any comments or feedback - I'm always happy to hear about this!

While I'm doing necessary office work (the books have to be kept once in a while, for tax stuff to be sorted out in time), part of my brain is still nibbling on the madder-water-tests. Especially that part which likes to add more and more things to an experiment... because, well, variables and such. And the good old "but but but there's more to find out, can we not?" thing. Aaah.

Current ponderings are related to the dyestuff, not the water. I had decided, in the start, that we'd use one batch of madder, preferably of at least decent quality, and if possible (very much preferred) of very good quality, to do the test runs. Now one of the colleagues asked "which madder are you planning to use", and I started thinking... It's clear that we will test different waters with the same madder - but should we also test different madder harvests/sources with the same water? There's definitely enough local tap water to do that, and I might be able to get two or three other waters in sufficient quantity to do a comparison of two to four different kinds of madder (well, technically one water would do, but maybe different madder qualities react differently to different waters)... so that would be an option. An option that tickles me, to be honest.

And that's not even dipping a toe, or fingertip, into the whole huge, HUGE topic of assists such as bran, fermented bran, beer, and other plant materials that were sometimes added to the madder bath. I've even read about the roots being roasted beforehand. So, so many things that one could try, and try to figure out what they do. In some cases it's pretty clear, at least part of it - adding sour material such as beer or fermented bran will adjust the pH, which is almost always a factor when dyeing. But what pH is the best one for the madder? And how did the dyers of old know how to dose it? (Well, if you just add beer or bran, you can taste it. That would definitely work.) But is the pH the only thing that will be doing stuff? Or would the fermented bran also do some microorganism magic and act on the madder roots while it all soaks before dyeing? Would the (probably dead) yeasts in the beer add something? Or the alcohol have an effect?

So many questions. It would probably be enough for a doctoral thesis (a pH-D-Thesis, hah!) to figure out all, or at least most, of the influences on the madder. 

Here's hoping that nobody will get mad when we tackle this at the Forum... 

To our great delight, Jessica Grimm, fellow archaeologist and professional embroideress, has agreed to do some testing of the membrane silver threads we made. 

(Jessica also teaches embroidery, both in-person and online. Do check out her page if you're interested!

And... we got first results! One of the sample batches was, as expected, not holding up too well, but shed some silver. (I think we messed up with that membrane, as there was glue on it....) Another one also shed some silver - that was a sample silvered with no glue at all. The others all held up rather well, and the test also showed that these threads are much more supple than if they were done with solid metal strips. (Also not entirely unexpected, but then you never know...)

That is a very nice result to get before the conference in Belfast. Now I'll have to think about how to shoehorn in one more sentence without going over time!

If you're following me on Instagram, you may have seen some pictures of this on-going project already. It is, so to say, a left-over from last year's European Textile Forum, where we tried to explore the making of membrane gold threads.

Membrane gold threads are the cheaper version of real gold threads - it's a gilt animal membrane wrapped around a fibrous core. In our case, we built on the analysis results of some Italian threads that Cristina Scibé is researching.

There's a lot of unknowns or insecure things in the reconstruction of the process, and we were (and mostly still are) unfamiliar with most of the materials involved, so there was a really steep learning curve and there were plenty of "d'oh" moments.

But we have arrived at a process that is working, and that would be plausible also for production.

The photo shows the two spindles I am working with for wrapping strips of stuff around the core - one with the two linen single yarns, and the other with the wrapped yarns. These are not membrane strips, but modern metal and metallised plastic strips, done for practise purposes, as the membrane is a little too much work and too much of a resource to use as training material.

It's an utterly fascinating project... and I will give a little presentation about it on the EAA in Belfast this year. I'm already very excited about that!

There's a bit of research happening here right now - not only for some work projects, but also for a little bit of extra. There was, you see, this project at the last Textile Forum to try and find out about how membrane threads were made.

Membrane threads are, to explain it very quickly, the cheap version of gold (or silver) threads. Instead of wrapping a strip of gold or gilt silver around a fibrous core, organic material is gilded or silvered with leaf metal and then cut into strips and wound around a core. Usually, that core is made of cheaper material as well, and not of silk like usual for the proper gold threads. 

In our case, we used bovine gut membrane and linen thread as core, plus leaf silver for the silvering. There was a stack of questions when we started the project, and then there were more and more questions, and now there is still a lot, but also mostly new ones - which is nice, as it means we found answers for many of the questions from the first batch.

I will present our results in August at the EAA conference, and I'm already looking forward to that a lot. The next steps will be a comparison between the originals and our results (where one of the outcomes will, very obviously, be that ours are not very well crafted...) and then we will know more about how our process compares with the original one.

For now, though, I am very happy with what we did.

Even though we lack proficiency in all the relevant steps (mixing the appropriate glue, gilding the membrane, cutting it and winding it around the core), we have arrived at a workable solution for all the process steps that feels like it would be suitable for actual production. It's still a complex, time-consuming process, but then that's the case with so many texile-related tasks that it fits right in. 

And I can't tell you how nice and satisfying it felt to actually produce silver thread in our last go at this reconstruction process!

At last year's Textile Forum, one of our topics was exploring how membrane gold threads may have been made. That is, in theory, a simple process - you take bovine membrane, gild it with silver-gilt leaf metal, then wind it around a fibrous core consisting of two spun vegetable fibre threads.

Simple, right? Well. As was to be expected, it's of course not so simple. First of all, how is the leaf metal attached to the membrane? There are a number of possibilities to do so. We tried using both oil and gelatin glue, and both worked. None of us was very proficient at gilding, but well, it was good enough for our purposes. 

Next step: Cutting the silvered skin into strips. The original strips were less than one millimetre wide, and that caused problems as well - both with the cutting (which could be done with scissors, or with knives, we don't really know) and with the strips afterwards. Because it turned out that if you cut very thin strips, they start to curl up. Which is not very helpful for the following steps. There's also the question of how long the strips were... and there are no analyses that I know of which look at the length of the strips used to wind around cores. Or, in the case of flat strips, the length of these.

 We found it much, much easier to wind a very long strip around the core than to use shorter ones, as the start and end always caused us problems. So we tried glueing the individual strips together... which basically worked very well, but we had issues with the glue: it was too brittle once dried.

So one of our next steps will be to try a different glue. There's also the possibility to modify animal glues with different additives to change their properties, including their elasticity, but we lack recipes for that, so we'll probably go with just the pure glues for now. (If you happen to know of any good, reliable recipes for making parchment glue or modifying it... they'd be very welcome!)

Things like that are the main reason why it's so important to do tests, and experiments, and try to recreate or reconstruct the actual working processes. Even if you're the best of researchers, it's just impossible to find out about all these small pitfalls by reconstructing a process on paper only. I'd never have considered how important the right choice of glue might be, or that the glue might be a crucial factor in how the membrane behaves - even though I've worked with glues a lot through my hobby bookbinding, and know from there that things will happen if you use the wrong glues, or too much or too little of them, or cover something on one side only. Which means I should have known, and as soon as the problem popped up, I went "oh yes, of course, that's an influence factor" - but before that... well. There's just too many things going on in any complex process (and most craft processes are complex processes) to consider them all without having the actual feedback from actual things being done.

And that all said, I will return to my preparation of some more tests in the project. It's guaranteed we will find some more questions, but I am hoping that we will find a few more answers too!