Adrienne d'Evreus' apprenticeship ceremony to Isabel Chamberlaine

Mistress Isabel Chamberlaine belts her new apprentice, Adrienne d'Evreus

Buckthorn berries, Yellow Experiment(s) 2

I tried to begin to follow another source to produce yellow.  I was working from Merrifield's Bolognese Manuscript, De Fiendis Viridibus again!  This book is so big, I'll never run out of possibilities. :D I will, ultimately, have to read it cover to cover.  I know I'm missing her details about general color production, opinions and her references.

Merrifield pg 428

The last ripe berries from Shana's New Hampshire Buckthorn bushes, about 30g, only yielded about 20 drops of juice so that attempt was unsuccessful.  At the end of September I found Buckthorn across the street in Saco.  I acquired the appropriate permission and went picking berries.  Someday I need to find an identification key for these Rhamnus spp bushes.  These berries seem plumper and larger, it must be a different variety or maybe they're just really ripe?

The 189g of big, juicy berries were manually squished with gloved hands and squeezed through cheesecloth to yield about 63g sludgy juice that I closed in a jar.

With fall archery events we were busy for more than the next month.  The juice sat closed in the jar for almost five weeks.  That was longer than the instructions indicated but I'm a volunteer... busy with being an archery safety officer and regular life activities when I'm not doing scribal or other Arts&Sciences projects!
I noted that when I finally opened the jar that the juice was definitely fermented and smelled like wine.
Athena Thickstun's blog helped me define that a 'fiasco' of wine is 2 liters.  One quarter of that would be 500g.  I didn't need that much so I made a smaller batch. Taking 200g distilled water I added a teaspoon of lye, K2CO3 (<1g on the kitchen scale that I had access to since I flooded the little one I had been using).  Then I added about the same quantity of alum (aluminum sulfate Al₂(SO₄)_3. which resulted in immediate fizzling.  [I have since found out that that is the wrong alum.  Next time I will use rock alum which I have learned is KAl(SO₄)₂.]  As instructed I heated it in my corning ware sauce pot on low for the time that it took me to recite the Our Father prayer in Latin:

Pater noster qui es in coelis sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua sicut in coela et in terra.
Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.
Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos demittimus debitoribus nostris.
Et ne nos inducas in temptationem.
Sed libera nos a malo.
Amen.

Adding the prepared lye/alum/water to the jar of juice there was an immediate color change of the reddish juice to a yellow/green liquid.

"Very fine white earth like the fellmongers use" is defined in Alexander's glossary in the Dover edition of Merrifield's treatises as lime.

In the spring of 2016 I was able to come back to this experiment.

I found pulverized (vs. pelletized) lime at one of the big box garden centers.

Speaking to Randy Asplund about it again he advised that I was basically making a lake pigment and elaborated on the volume of a mezetta, "In Florence the mezzetta was equal to 0.7613 liters."  I recalled that I had made a smaller volume and not very accurately measured the lye and water in the fall because my little scale had died the quick death of drowning in a different experiment.  Water under the bridge; I'll know the correct mezzetta volume next time!  Regardless, this might have worked anyway.

Back to creating a lake pigment... Cool!  I have never made a lake.  The Materials and Techniques of medieval painting talks about brazil lakes:

Sometimes the decoction of brazil wood with alum was precipitated with chalk, and a more opaque, pink, rose colour was produced by the resulting admixture of calcium sulphate to the alumina lake.  Sometimes, in England, instead of adding chalk to the solution, a chalk stone was hollowed out, and little holes were made in the bottom of the hollow, and the hot alum solution coloured with brazil was poured into the hollow of the chalk.  The reaction between the alum and the chalk took place at the surface of the chalk stone, in that case, and a crust of semi-opaque brazil lake was formed in the hollow and in the little holes.
When lakes were made by precipitating the alum solution with the chalk, the calcium sulphate was formed automatically along with the lake, in intimate combination with it.  Sometimes brazil lakes were given some opacity by adding opaque substances to them at the moment of precipitation, and even after.  When white lead was used, as it sometimes was, it had no other effect than to give a little substance to the lake, to make it a little less transparent, and to develop the rosy colour.  when marble dust and powdered egg shells were added to the newly formed lakes, or introduced along with the precipitating agent, they probably had the further effect of controlling the colour produced by reacting chemically with any excess of alum which might give a brown cast instead of the desired rose.  In all these cases the brazil colour was mordanted upon the white material, whether calcium sulphate, or an excess of chalk, or white lead, or marble dust, or powered egg shells.  The white substances were, so to speak, dyed with the brazil; and the pigment so formed was different from a mixture of a finished lake with the white pigment. (Thompson 119)

So, since I'm making a lake, I tried both crushed eggshell and pulverized lime.  I took about 10 g of each and pipetted off about 5 g of liquid from the jar into each material.  The eggshell is probably not pulverized enough to paint with.  I wonder if I can mull it or crush it down and use it anyway.  And just maybe add more of the buckthorn/aluminum sulfate/lye juice after "in order that it may become more beautiful and of a brighter colour" (Merrifield 428)

Buckthorn yellow.  Ripe buckthorn berry juice with lye and aluminum sulfate with crushed eggshell.

Buckthorn yellow.  Ripe buckthorn berry juice with lye and aluminum sulfate with pulverized lime.

This experiment produced beautiful yellows!  Some day I'll try to paint with them.  I bet you can paint with the plain juice like with the sap green as a transparent glaze.  I wonder if you can make a green lake with that juice with lime or eggshells too.  Anyway, yay yellow!

Mr. Asplund advises that this yellow lake can be produced in the same way from green berries too.  Awesome!

Dyeing skins green with Buckthorn berries, ripe berries Experiment 3

I was excited to try dyeing some leather green using another recipe from one of Mary Merrifield's translated Original Treatises.  "Someday", I secretly dreamed, "Mistress Isabel Chamberlaine might make my wish a reality and take me as an apprentice.  I'll need a green belt!"  Spoiler alert... I was apprenticed at Birka!

Adrienne's Experiment steps:

Research

Collect materials

SAFETY FIRST... 

 Suit up with nitrile gloves, goggles over glasses and dust mask!

Back to the medieval inspiration for the dream for the need of a green belt...

Bolognese MS De Tintis ad Tigendum Pellum (Merrifield 558)

I wasn't sure what a medieval "boiler" was.  Not wanting to contaminate any of my food-grade cast iron pots, I used the same corning ware sauce pan as in Experiment 2.  I used another 100g of the ripe buckthorn berries from Shana's.  They had a few leafy bits but I wasn't willing to arduously pick that out and I didn't want to contaminate my berries by rinsing them.

Combining the ripe berries with the same quantity, by weight, of organic, unfiltered cider vinegar (Bragg brand) I continued to follow the instructions.  I put it on the simmer burner of my gas stove on low for fourty-one minutes.  When the berries and vinegar had "boiled a little" I took it off the heat.  I let it cool a bit then poured it into a washed, secured square of linen over a clean jar then squeezed the juice out into the sealable glass jar.

When I tried to paint it, the shinier 'outside' part of my leather just achieved a blueish gloss and the sueded part still blueish.  Maybe it's just because it's a modernly prepared piece of leather?  

Painting the first three experiments out on a small piece of leather, the only one that's green is Experiment 2.

I painted them out again onto what turned out to be chromium tanned moose leather six months later with pretty much the same results.

                                              Left 3/18/16                Right 9/15/15
                                         Experiment 1                   Experiments 3,2 and 1  
                                         Experiment 3
                                         Experiment 2

Tomorrow I'll try again on Vegetable tanned leather from Birka.

Sap Green 2 from Buckthorn berries

This is the continuation of my research on trying the medieval paint recipes for Sap Green from Buckthorn.

Once I figured out what Buckthorn berry bushes looked like I began to see them everywhere.  Consequence?  More experiments!

I visited my good friend Shana Clark in New Hampshire to raid her local Buckthorn bushes in early September.  They were growing in a more open area in more sun than the ones in the first experiment.  The branches were full of berries, mostly ripe and dark and with a few green.  The next day I sorted them into 53g of green and 341g of ripe berries.

I had already experimented with the Iris Green paint recipe from De Arte Illuminandi with pretty results so I was excited to put the recommendations for Buckthorn to use.

De Arte Illuminandi, pg 7

And it's note: 

De Arte Illuminandi (Thompson and Hamilton 43)

Then the recipe:

De Arte Illuminandi (Thompson and Hamilton 7)

Adrienne's Experiment steps:

Research

Collect materials

SAFETY FIRST...

Suit up with nitrile gloves, goggles over glasses and dust mask!

I took 100.00g of ripe buckthorn berries and crushed them with a plastic fork.

In a glazed porcelain (corningware) sauce pan I mixed 11.60g of lye (K2CO3) with about 100g distilled water.  Adding 5.05g of alum (aluminum sulfate) resulted in immediate bubbling.  The reactions at this point have raised the temperature a little to 80F.  Warming the mixture on a simmer burner on low, I hoped to dissolve more of the alum.  After about ten minutes the bubbling had mostly stopped, the temperature had risen to 120F and the solution had a pH of 6 with a milky appearance.  After heating it up to encourage the alum to dissolve and losing a little in the sink when I poured it into the jar with crushed berries, the total weight of the solution had decreased to 87.07g.  There was also a little residue left in the pan.

I mixed the solution into the berries with the same plastic fork I had used to crush them.  The next day I found the solution bubbling out of my pint jar!  I got rid of the beautifully green paper towel beneath my jar and put it in a glass bowl.  As the recipe directs I "let them stand so, out of the way, for three days".  After they had rested I used a clean square of linen to strain the juice into another jar.

The next week I painted it out!  What a beautiful green!

Medieval Mappae Clavicula Elderberry Paint Recipe

Last year I posted some medieval recipes for blue paint from elderberries here.  And the testing of it as blue paint here.

I am excited to expand the post to include pictures of a manuscript of the Mappae Clavicula, one of the medieval recipe sources I used.  The manuscript is held at Rakow Research Library which is part of The Corning Museum of Glass.   The entire manuscript can be downloaded from their website here.

This picture is provided by the courtesy of the Rakow Research Library, The Corning Museum of Glass.

This table of contents entry is toward the beginning of the parchment leaves.  The numbers were penned in red ink probably after at least most of the book was written. We'll see the red ink again later.

To me the latin content entry reads:

lxxxiii
Indicum colorem facere.

Which can be translated as

eighty-three
To make an indigo color.

In the manuscript we find the page with the description of how to make the blue color.  Note the different colored inks used again.  This time perhaps to designate titles versus instruction.

This picture is also provided by the courtesy of the Rakow Research Library, The Corning Museum of Glass.

Mostly trusting and heavily relying on the Latin edition found on Corning's website here, on page 28 which can be accessed by typing in 32 of 70 pages in the downloadable pdf, the abbreviated latin probably reads as:

Indicum colorem facere.  Succum de ba(c)cis ebuli collige et diligenter sicca at solem de hoc quod remanserit fac pastillos cum parvo aceti et vini et utere 

According to a magazine I interlibrary loaned, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society held at Philidelphia for promoting useful knowledge, New Series Volume 64 part 4 written by Smith and Hawthorne in 1974 in the article "Mappae Clavicula, a little key to the world of Medieval Techniques", it can be translated as:

97. Making indigo pigment.  Collect the juice of dwarf elderberries and dry it thoroughly in the sun.  From what remains make pastilles with a little vinegar and wine, then use it.

I would have translated "Indicum color facere." as "make indigo color" but high school Latin class was a long time ago now. Perhaps the disagreement with what number of the recipe has to do with either different manuscript versions, mis-translation (probably by me, I'm pretty new at deciphering manuscripts) or the numbering being added either after the book was done by the original scribe or by a different scribe, perhaps even at a different time. I have not finished reading all of the resources on the internet about Mappae Clavicula; maybe I'll eventually find more theories about the differences but I wanted to share the great references provided by the Corning Museum of Glass and it's Rakow Research Library. Go check out that manuscript; it's great!

Sap Green 1 from Buckthorn berries, medieval paint recipes,

There are many medieval sources with recipes for Sap Green, the beautiful paint and pigment used to provide green in medieval miniatures and to dye skins green among other things.

My first Experiment to produce green with Buckthorn was one from Mary Merrifield's Original Treatises, a 15th century recipe from Bolognese MS De Fiendis Veridibus (Merrifield 426)

I picked the berries in August in Westbrook, Maine.  Here's that first recipe:

Mary Merrifield's Original Treatises pg. 426

As the recipe suggests the day after picking the berries I combined about fifty grams each of ripe berries and Hannaford white vinegar of 5% acidity in a glazed sauce pan and heated it at gas mark two on the simmer burner of my stove.  At two minutes I noted that it was steaming, at four forming bubbles.  Five minutes in it was spattering so I turned it down to low and simmered until the weight of the mixture had reduced by about half which took about thirty-five minutes.  I poured it all into a square of washed clean linen secured over a canning funnel over a glass jar then squeezed as much liquid as I could into the jar.  The liquid looked dark purple.  Several days later I painted it out.

The alum water I used in the following paints is pure alum, Aluminum Sulfate, Al2(SO4)3, and distilled water in a 1:10 ratio.  This should make an acidic solution.

"A" consisted of a drop of the buckthorn and white vinegar juice as well as Winsor Newton Gum Arabic.  It painted out blue then turned green the next day.
"B" a drop of the vinegar-buckthorn berry juice, one drop of the gum water and a drop of alum water.  It painted out green immediately.

A on the left, B on the right.  Still wet B is already green.

"C" is the same as A in a clam shell, it painted out red purple-y and turned green by the next day.

"D" is C, juice and gum in a clam shell, with a drop of the same 1:10 alum water in B and like B it painted out green and stayed green.

Ultimately there will be an updated picture of after all of them turned green and one of my notes too!

And more experiments:
Experiment 2

Lord Deormund Wulfscyld's Sagittarius scroll creation

 Lord Deormund Wulfscyld - Order of the Sagittarius AS L

Words: Lady Adrienne and Lord Alexandre
Gouache and Gold Illumination: Lady Adrienne d'Evreus
Calligraphy and white work: Lord Alexandre Saint Pierre