lye from lees and more

From lime or calcined wine lees

Strasbourg Manuscript: lye from calcined wine lees (Neven 170) who quotes Colmarer Kunstbuch.

Alchemy of Paint
Bucklow (28-29, 48, 61-64, 69,75,109, 200)

First Lye post with personal references

Centaurea cyanus, Blue Bottle trial 1 & 2 2017-18

A (poor, sorry!) picture of the first trials for blue from my cornflowers. The top is plain cornflower petal juice squeezed out and painted on vellum surface Strathmore 300 Series Bristol board and the bottom is on the same bristol on a ground of lead white.

Cornflower blue references

Bachelor buttons, blue bottle, corn flowers, cornflower, corne flower, corn-floure, the flowers that grow among the corn...  We have a plethora of evidence that medieval pigment producers used Centaurea cyanus to make their own lovely, if fugitive, blue. Lets find some translated sources!

Click "Read More" below to continue!

lime from Oyster shells

Instructions for making oyster shells into lime aka quicklime exist in Mappae Clavicula (Smith and Hawthorne 51-2). I'll include the authors note too as I think it's an interesting judgement about the resulting purity of the product.

(Smith and Hawthorne 51-2)

Lime is CaO, calcium oxide. Slaked lime is basically just lime 'slaked', or mixed, with water turning it into calcium hydroxide Ca(OH)2.

Lime was useful medievally and broadly employed for painting (Merrifield 298-300) and building houses among other things.

Gerard's Herbal provenance explained

Gerard's Herbal which is "...simply an English translation of Dutch scholar Rembert Dodoen’s highly popular herbal of 1554." (Virginia edu website), 

Pandius

Reading along in Mappae Clavicula as translated by Smith, Cyril Stanley and Hawthorne, Daniel G. I keep seeing the term 'pandius' for mixes of different colors but not always the same hues, tints or combinations and then an explanation:

Smith, Cyril Stanley and Hawthorne, Daniel G.'s Mappae Clavicula (42)

Ibid 42-43

I'll have to go looking in the other translations of colors in medieval MS soon to see if they use 'pandius'...

medieval butterflies

Order of the Silver Brooch for Mariette de Bretagne

woad 2017

A brief word about indigo containing plants first. In my studies I have learned that indigo blue can be isolated from at least three different plants: woad (Isatis tinctoria), "bagdad" indigo (Indigofera tinctoria), and Japanese Indigo (Persicaria tinctoria/Polygonum tinctorum). The first time I tried Indigofera tinctoria I only got two plants to germinate at all and they yielded no blue. The same year, 2015, I grew Isatis tinctoria and yielded a little success but only sufficient florey in my vat to paint out one circle of blue that I evidently didn't take pictures of. 2016 was the summer we moved. There were no extant gardens on the property and not enough energy to install them until 2017.

In 2017 I grew woad, Isatis tinctoria, in three large red planters in the front garden at the new house in Windham. I was more careful to feed the plants well in 2017. Two of the pots were only "50/50" mix from the garden center who said "It's really about 70/30 loam and Benson's. Any richer would burn your plants." And the third pot included amazing compost from an acquaintance of my mom who makes it with kitchen scraps and mess from his chicken coop.

Medieval Manuscript Garlic references 2017

The juice of hard necked garlic, Allium sativum, grown across the world in northern latitudes, may be used for all sorts of culinary applications as well as a gilding binder and more.

 Allium sativum scapes growing 2017

 

Read more by clicking through!

More Saffron yellow resources

From Booke of Secrets:

Another yellow

Mix saffron with the yolke of an eg, and it maketh a faire shining colour. Otherwise.
Put saffron and alum into a clout, and put vineger into it, and strain it out: or take saffron, the yolke of an eg, gum Arabike and alum, and mix them together.

And another from a translation of Simone's MS 1793 in the Getty's Historical Painting:

Wallert 1996

flax seed to linen?

In 2017 I grew flax seed. The easiest seed to find was in the bulk section of a local grocery store. I bought a few pounds of both organic brown and yellow varieties. I now know that food varieties will not make the longest fibers nor are they even the right specie. I also planted the seeds in a less than ideal configuration. Sometimes learning is done the hard way. I don't have any printed sources that talk about growing or processing linen and I was reticent to try to find any but those I could find online for free.

A better seed source would be Linum usitatissimum from the linked garden center or another reputable seller and planting should be done in a large garden (rather than strips) so it stands up against itself which may discourage branching.

Read more below for this crazy trial.

Calendula paint

and here it is under different lighting, click Read More please!

Calendula yellow

Calendula officinalis, pot marigold, is a beautiful little flower, sometimes called poor man's saffron.

I know one can make paint out of saffron, like I did here, so why not try Calendula?

 Read more about my Calendula experiment below!

Sambucus spp. Elderberries

You know when you think you know what you're talking about and then 'Eureka!' you decide your assumptions/theories/plans were wrong. Oops!

I keep reading about anthocyanin pigments (Neven 173-4) and how they can be produced by various things including elderberries. All of a sudden I went back to a different book and my mind opened up. Sambucus spp. are not always what we want to grow to make Elderberry wine or pie... 'Dwarf elder', which is what one of the medieval treatises calls for, is a different plant!

Sambucus ebulus
Dwarf Elder, otherwise known as Danewort "is the most active pharmacologically... it's fruit should be considered poisonous. The dark purple berries are certainly violently purgative; in the Middle Ages both these and the roots or root bark were used as such.
...
The Anglo-Saxons and Gauls employed Dwarf Elder berries as a blue dye, and this is now the main use for this herb." (Stuart 258)

So... I guess I want to try to grow S. ebulus too!

Smith and Hawthorne 41

I shall have to mine the references of Encyclopedia of Herbs and Herbalism (Stuart) before I decide that their S. ebulus dye claim is accurate. I've just found another source that uses S. niger for their blue (Wallert 1993). And thus, we're back to common names making research difficult.

lulax means indigo

Looking for another 'vegetable blue' I found this reference. I have seen 'lulax'  few times and see that Mappae Clavicula as translated by Smith and Hawthorne has this note:

or does it...

perhaps it just means a certain color blue?

Smith and Hawthorn 55

'vergaut'? Blue and yellow make green!

The term 'vergaut' was introduced to me by Elena Wyth when she asked a question about mixing indigo and orpiment on Facebook. I hadn't come across it before, so I went to the books!

There seem to be many medieval instructions for mixing orpiment and indigo but few call it vergaut, as far as I can see. Read more below to see what a brief search helped me find.

chalk of eggshells

Book of Secrets

sal ammoniac

Many of the recipes in medieval MS contain references to sal ammoniac. So, what is it anyway? The glossary in Merrifield's Medieval and Renaissance Treatises is helpful, once again!

Ammonium chloride, NH₄Cl.