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.