I am rather pleased with how well this came out, especially the proper black. You can see where the appliques used to sit on the ground, and the dragon isn't precisely where it used to be (I've gotten better at getting applique to lay flatter on the field), but from a few feet away it's nearly as good as new. The red linen was overdyed with a solution of two exhaust baths: madder and cochineal. It took the better part of a day and a half in the dye bath to darken it to this point, and while you can see some of the original unfaded colour, I'm pleased that linen took natural dyes so strongly. It's not quite as dark as the original store-boughten shade, but I never expected to be able to achieve that. The black woollen dragon had faded to charcoal, so I put him into the same madder/cochineal bath, and then overdyed that with indigo. The black here is even darker than the original black, and I believe is proof positive that one can achieve "true black" through historical means (dark fleece + madder + indigo). Am happy to have rehabbed this banner, as I've a bit of emotional attachment to it, and I'm glad to make it look as good as new.

Today is Towel Day an unofficial holiday to celebrate the late Douglas Admas. Back in my college days there was the mainly nice Physics student who would sort Smarties into their separate colours before giving you a tube, just to see the expression on your face; and then there were the other Physics students who ate Frey Bentos pies and thought that having a sense of humour meant memorising the complete works of Douglas Adams. It is a tribute to just how cool Douglas Adams must have been, that people like me, who knew Frey Bentos eaters, still really enjoy his work. In fact for the last 20 years the BBC radio versions of his Hitchhikers stories have been helping me deal with my insomnia. ... and remember "a towel... is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have." This one was bought in Peter Jones, Sloane Square, London, SW1, sometime in the 1990's, undoubtedly the most expensive towel I've ever bought, it has served me well. It's particularly cool because a totally different Peter Jones, a comic actor, not a department store, was the voice of the book.