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!

These are madder roots from our garden, freshly dug out. They'll make part of the second part of our experiment on madder dyeing - using different batches of madder with the same water, and see how different they will come out.

Madder is said to get better the longer it matures - first in the ground, then once harvested, resting time of a few years is also said to make it better. But I figure that too-fresh madder may be better than no madder at all...

It will be dried now and then ground up, and I hope for a yield of at least 30 g afterwards (though in a pinch, 10 g would be enough). It would definitely be nice to have some more samples to test. So - do you happen to have a bit of dried madder to spare? Would you be willing to donate 10 to 30 g of it for our experiment?

Just in case you were curious on how much wool one can fit into a 250 ml lab glass beaker, it's about 12 g of dry goods in this example, consisting of a small skein of yarn and a piece of fabric about 17 cm square:

tIt fits, but there's not much floating possibility... so it might be a good idea to put in a little less wool. Probably a smaller piece of fabric, and maybe a little more yarn to stay at sort-of-sensible amounts (but yarn will be a bit less, um, stiff?).

It's always fascinating to watch things unfold and questions come up when planning an experiment. There's usually a lot of aspects, and one has to decide on how to handle each one, while knowing that in many cases there's no really good solution that will cover all the possibilities..

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... 

And we go on with the series of CfPs - this time, it's sort of on my own behalf:

I am very happy to announce that the Call for Papers for the European Textile Forum 2023 is now open!

We will look into "Dimensions of Dyeing: Colours, Mordants, Processes."
The European Textile Forum in 2023 will take place in Mayen, Germany, in the Laboratory for Experimental Archaeology (part of the Leibniz Research Institute for Archaeology), November 6 to November 12. It is a small conference which aims to explore archaeological and historical textiles in both theory and practice. For this, we combine paper presentations and workshops or practical sessions on the paper's topic. These practical parts are either led by the presenter, for instance to teach a reconstructed method or technique and have the rest of the participants try it, or they can take more of a "community brainstorming" form, if the method is not yet known. With this combination, we also want to connect practical specialists and theoretical specialists.

This year it is time to look at colours and dyeing. Colours played an important part in historical textiles. Bright colours did not only show off wealth, they could also have symbolic meanings. Dyeing processes can range from very simple, with little knowledge and effort needed, to very complex, just as the dyestuff can be very cheap - such as leaves or walnut husks - to extremely expensive, such as Murex snails for true purple. At the Forum in 2023, we want to look at the many dimensions of dyes, dyeing processes, and the use of colour in textiles - including special cases such as the re-use of coloured textiles to make painting pigments, or the use of paints to colour textiles. Mordants and their role in dyeing should, of course, not be forgotten.

We'd like to invite you to do a presentation or workshop, or both, to explore the different procedures, tools, and materials related to mordanting and dyeing or otherwise colouring textiles. Work space outside and inside is available, so it will be possible to dye on open fire, or indoor using heating plates or similar equipment. Presentations can be between 15 and 45 minutes, with workshop time or time for practical exploration afterwards as necessary.
For more information, take a look at the full Call for Papers on our website. Registration for the conference is also open now, and you can find the registration form here.

Please do also pass this Call for Papers on to others who might be interested - thank you!

Not all that glitters is gold - sometimes it's just gilt silver, hammered into leaf metal, attached to a thin animal membrane and then wrapped around a thread core.

You might know about medieval gold thread, which was usually a strip of metal (often gilt silver, very rarely pure gold) wrapped around a silk core. Well, that's the "good" version, high-quality and rather pricey. And as always, if there's something posh and fancy and expensive, someone tries to get the same effect but for cheaper.

Enter the membrane threads. These are usually not around a silk core, but around a thread made from vegetable fibres, and the metal strip is replaced by animal membranes or, in other places, by a thin leather strip or by a paper strip. These are metallised with leaf metal, and here again, you can make it cheaper by reducing the amount of gold. How? By using "Zwischgold" - silver hammered out, then covered with a thin layer of gold, and this then hammered into leaf metal. 

Gold leaf is really, really thin, so thin that you cannot touch it with your hands. It will instantly cling to your skin and then dissolve. Medieval gold leaf was thicker than modern gold leaf, but it would still not be handle-able without gilding tools. Gold was expensive - so having the cheaper silver as the main metal and just adding a bit of gold would reduce costs considerably. New research about Zwischgold shows how it looked, and the thicknesses given are about 30 nm of gold in the Zwischgold as opposed to c 140 nm thickness of the regular gold leaf. 

This superthin stuff needs something to cling to, so it is stable enough for further processing. In the cheap gold threads that we were aiming to reproduce, animal membranes were used - to be more precise, a layer of membrane from bovine guts. 

So we had a go at silvering them - using not proper Zwischgold, but leaf silver, since that was a lot cheaper to get and is closer to the medieval original material. Then the membrane has to be cut into strips, and the strips then wound around a core, all of which proved to be do-able, but with a lot of room for improvement.

Both the gilding and the wrapping did require a lot of concentration! It also took us a while to puzzle out a method with which a longer piece of thread could be wrapped without getting too much of a twist buildup. 

A final very important part of making these threads, as we also found out: Time. Once the metal is on the membrane, it needs sufficient time to dry out properly, or it will come right off the membrane and right onto everything else - fingers, faces, tables, you name it! With enough drying time, it is much more stable.

Just like with the purple dye imitation, a good bit of work remains to be done on this, but we're very, very pleased with our preliminary results.

I am back, and I had a wonderful time at the Forum - with all the typical hustle and bustle and utter, complete and wonderful madness that this week brings.

We had threads and thread-making as the focus topic, which meant that there were lots and lots of things for me to load into the car and ferry to Mayen - from tools to heckle flax or hemp to all kinds of spindles and spinning tools, plus some other tools in case something needed cutting, sawing, drilling or sanding. (There was some drilling done, so these did come in handy.) There were nettles, and there was wool of all kinds, and some cotton, and as always, it was not enough time during the week to do all the things that I had hoped to do.

That does not mean, though, that there was only little done - on the contrary. We managed to really do a lot of things, with work going on from right after breakfast to long after dinner... spinning, splicing, and some other things as well.

Micky Schoelzke spent a lot of her time in the laboratory room, working on a large series of dye variations to explore fake purple - the imitation of true snail purple dye through the combination of blue (from woad) and red (from madder). Some of the tests were overdyeing, and some of the tests were dyeing fibre to later blend together in different combinations of shades and different ratios.

The blending was a lot of fun, with lots of people working together to weigh the fibres, then blend them, and then spin little samples for comparison. It also looks like blending fibres is much easier to do for achieving a purple-ish colour than the overdying method. The blend will result in a slightly speckled look of the finished product (as can also be seen on a few extant samples where this method was used), while the overdyeing gets a more even result that can come closer to the Real Thing. However, hitting the right colour when overdyeing is much harder than blending fibres together, especially since you can do a little sample with the blending and then adjust ratios rather easily, while overdyeing is much more fickle. Yes, you can do a test dye, but the time, effort, and resources required for that are much higher than to do a test blend or two.

There's still a lot to explore on this topic, and I'm looking forward to more on it. The comparative ease of the fibre blending opposed to the overdyeing is, however, an argument for dyeing something in the wool that I can readily accept - because I'd usually vote that dyeing something in the yarn, or in the fabric, makes more sense. Less felting (which will occur even if you are very careful with your fibre), less loss of dyed fibre, and the yarn needs to be wet-finished anyways so dyeing will take care of that as well... plus yarns are easier to handle than fibre is. But if you want to spin blends of colour, well, you have no choice but to dye in the fibre.

The other big experimental action of this year's Forum was making gilt membrane threads... and I will tell you a bit more about that tomorrow.