Madder, Weld, and Woad

Europe's classic medieval red, yellow, and blue dye plants can make a rainbow of colors with overdyeing. These three plants–all grown in my garden–dyed the wool (at the A&S Day in the Park); to which I spun (my first real spinning, plying, etc); and then tablet wove (simple Finnish Iron Age pattern); before being sewn onto my garb, which is also dyed with madder. So much color from these scraggly green plants.

A Medieval European Palette

I get asked a lot if fabric colors are "period." After making a display of some possible medieval colors for and A&S table I decided to use up the resulting stash with little pin-loom woven swatches to have a larger visual representation of the greater palette of medieval Europe. What I thought was a stash-busting project turned into quite the opposite with 196 squares dyed with dyestuffs available in medieval Europe, including madder, weld, and woad, but many more, too.

Tablet Weaving

I try to weave as much as possible with fibers dyed by me with natural dyes. It's all part of my slow research on color fastness. The first band pictured has a rainbow of 31 natural colors! The next photo is the rainbow warp for that band. The last two bands are Finnish Iron age designs in indigo, natural, and cochineal.

Yardage Dyeing

Naturally dyeing roving or yarn is one thing, naturally dyeing yardage is something else, specifically a big hot and heavy mess of something else. Of course, I have the goal of only having naturally-dyed garb. I'm not there yet, but I have done a few outfits.

Pigments

Organic pigments are the obvious next step when working with natural dyes. Lake pigments are the result of adding a substrate like chalk to a dye and shifting the pH to alkaline. The soluble color compounds bind to the substrate and can then be filtered out, dried (or not), and mulled, to be stored until the artist wants to use the colors for illumination. The three bottles are madder lake, weld lake, and woad, which is special because its natural extracted state is insoluble and therefore needs less processing to become a bottled pigment.

Parchment

My family raises a small flock of sheep for meat. I started using the hides last year to make parchment under the tutelage of David de Rosier Blanc. I am experimenting with period recipes for coloring parchment. The last photo shows a Cennini indigo paint tempered with hide glue.

Book Arts

A process that, for me, starts in the field and garden and ends with the summation of most of my skills: animal raising, gardening, parchment making, sewing, dyeing, pigment making, and illumination. Just need to work on the calligraphy! The small books in the first photo represent one dye plant each from my garden and the array of colors that can be achieved with it in dye and pigment form. They are accordion folded watercolor paper bound in parchment. The bigger book I made up to be an illustrated journal of my first year of parchment making. The pages are Pergamenata limp vellum bound. These were all on Artisans' Display at 12th Night, along with my parchment archive.

Illumination

I come to illumination with a degree in painting, but almost no instruction in period practices. I look forward to learning from many of the West Kingdom's wonderful scribal folk. For now, I am copying extant work and experimenting with materials. Did you know there is a recipe for medieval faux stained glass on parchment? One of the images below is an example of this technique. Can you find it? I usually only use a brush for illumination, but for the Scribal War I did the outline version of my entry with crow quill and ink. My Scribal War entry is one of the et/ampersand symbols from the Book of Kells with some modifications to fit the theme of historiated capital letter. I turned the animal heads into creatures wearing plague doctor masks and hats since we are living through a plague and it seemed a nice tie in. Yes, I know plague masks are slightly post period. If you can't have fun with a plague doctor mask during an actual plague for a scribal war, I just don't know when it would be appropriate. Enjoy.

Thank you for looking and any feedback (see form below).

YIS, Lady Michiele l'encriere