I have 12 yards of fairly heavy linen, it is in a nice medium bluish green, more green than blue, tiel might be a good word for it, or not.
It is the wrong color for what we want to make, but it’s the right fabric (linen, in my stash, and lots of it!) NO $$ right now to go shop for the same fabric in another color.
Several questions:
1. is a blue-green at all usable for 12th Century Venice? I’m thinking a nice Byzantine outfit.
2. Should I bleach it before attempting to dye it, and will that damage the fabric? I’m trying for some decent degree of authenticity just because it appeals to me, however, my knowledge is nowhere up to my goals.
3. If I tried to dye over the green, what suggestions could you make about color and dye choices that might give me something that the authenticity mavens would approve?
~ Karla Dick
Message #856, February 26, 2003
I’ve been thinking
about you. The book Storia del Costume in Italia has many references to 12th century Venetian
costume. Since it is in Italian, it is slow reading for me; some sentences
I get right away, others might as well be Greek
without a dictionary. I’m thinking
the whole 60 or so pages need translation
(sigh), because there is some interesting information I have not read elsewhere. It does seem that Italian
12th century fashions ranged from
the ‘French’ style bliaut to very Byzantine in flavor. The pictures in this book are fabulous, so
you may want to check it out on
ILL just for that! It would make a good foundation book for SCA documentation.
Sorry I haven’t answered your questions on color!
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #857, February 26, 2003
Storia del costume in Italia.
Author: Levi Pisetzky, Rosita.
Publication: [Milano] Istituto editoriale italiano 1964-
Document: Italian : Book
LCCN: 65-50594
OCLC: 3159079 (for those on the WorldCat system)
v. illus. (part col.) facsims. (part col.) 32 cm.
You will want volume 1 for the 12th century, volume 2 covers 14th
and 15th centuries, volume 3 16th and 17th centuries.
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #859, February 26, 2003
I had some nice blue fabric, tending towards teal. Too much green in it to be plain woad, and to my mind, too little green in it to have bothered overdyeing it to get that colour.
After thinking about things, and considering my deadline (I had about 2 months to dye, and construct the garment, including my decision to do hand sewn eyelets, trimmings, hems, etc. for a competition) I decided to overdye the fabric with half the recommended quantity of commercial yellow dye.
My reasons:
- I was worried about weakening the fabric by bleaching (probably not a worry – just paranoid, and it would take longer and cost more too)
- The cost of commercial dyes for 1kg of fabric was considerable – by using a weaker yellow wash was ok for an overdye, but I would need a stronger dye to get an colour onto my fabric on it’s own.
- There is some evidence for overdying yellow over blue to get green. This would presumably be a colour not available to the poorest people, which suited my court bilaut style.
- I knew of no source of Natural dyes in sufficient quantities, available quickly.
So I elected for a green dress, as the cheapest and quickest option. The basic evidence I found was more tenuous for green, but i could make an decent argument for it (the only thing I’m not sure of is the shade)
Another option I considered was overdying it to a dark woad blue – (possibly after a mild bleaching – remember my fabric was bluer than yours) I have seen dark blue dresses in manuscripts, commonly enough. Look at for colours:
http://www.bleu-de-lectoure.com/sommaiuk.html
But it would have required $40 Australian (about $20US?) which was about the cost of the fabric for 2 dresses I bought (gotta love those cheap throw out places and end of bolt deals, once you can tell the difference between real linen and the poly stuff they also put on the same stand). I THINK the coronation robes of Roger(?) are also in a very dark blue, so you MIGHT have an extant garment on your side too.
As for green – that’s harder to document. The green inks used on manuscripts weren’t the same ones used on dresses, so evidence from these isn’t very good, i.e. there are pictures of green dresses, but not in the same colours as the fabric may have been, and some of these may have been originally blue inks. However, a green made from woad overdyed with weld (or is it the other way around?) was used in Viking times, 11 or was it 12th C Spain and 14th C Europe (just a few examples from a web browse – The lack of dye recipes for our period, combined with the scarcity of extant garments makes this very difficult to tell). There is a dubious reference to Lincoln green during the 12th century (see this topic on Stefan’s Floregium:
http://www.florilegium.org/files/TEXTILES/green-art.html
which was probably also referring to woad(blue) + weld(yellow) or dyer’s greenweed (also yellow, but makes green with woad).
So green was definitely used in the medieval period, both before, after, and probably during the 12th Century. (I’m fairly sure we could document this given enough effort, and skills in a few additional medieval languages). Was it available all over Europe? Probably. Trade in fine fabrics was occurring, Venice I think would have had easy access to this trade, so even if these dyes didn’t grow locally, they could be imported as dyestuffs or dyed fabrics.
What colour green was it? That’s a harder question to answer without a full research search. Asking modern dyers what colour green woad + weld make, the (handful) of answers (unfortunately all written, no test swatches yet) range from teal through to olive. I just made my best guess. Well actually I threw in my yellow dye and saw what colour it turned. It’s a brilliant mid green halfway between emerald and jade. It’s pretty spectacular that it turned out that bright at 1/2 the recommended strength. I’ll be very happy if someone comes up to me and says “that’s not quite a period colour because…” and shows me colour swatches with good documentation. I’ve been wearing the garb for the last 4 months to most events (it’s my favourite piece, and in light weight linen so much cooler in the summer we’re having here at the moment) and that hasn’t even remotely happened yet (even, when submitting my garb in a competition and thus inviting comments).
So – teal is possible from period dyestuffs (you have this second hand, but it was on one of the yahoo dyeing lists – so it’ll be in the archives). Some colour/s of green are also possible and probable in period. i don’t know which. Few people out there know much about 12th C dyestuffs as the first known dye recepies are 13th century, and extant 12th C textiles are uncommon (on that though – katrine are any of your textiles got green threads in them. Of course such colours may have faded too)
Good luck. It’ll look pretty whatever colour you choose.
(Yes i’ll post the rest of my web references later if you ask – there at home, I might need a bit of reminding)
~ Teffania / Tiffany Brown
Message #862, February 27, 2003
I THINK the coronation robes of Roger? are also in a very dark blue, so you MIGHT have an extant garment on your side too.
I know some books call the dalmatic blue, but the image I have seen on line sure looks purple…I think I might have something on this from Byzantine Silk Weaving.
Most of the images I have seen [in my textile books] are in black and white, although the accompanying text may describe color. I will have to wade through it. (Another database!) I did post a color image of a green, that looks to be somewhere between jade and emerald to me! I have a new textile book coming in on ILL that covers the Abegg collection of medieval fabrics – it may be in today, and I have a lot of hope that it may be in color!
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #864, February 27, 2003
Here is another example of green, again, of silk on a linen ground.
[Link to photo broken]
Book title: Abegg Stiftung Bern in Riggisberg II Textilien
by Mecthild Lemberg and Brigitta Schmedding, 1973,
ISBN 3-258-01361-6
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #869, February 27, 2003
I have access to a book that has high quality photos of it (well 2 books actually – one has a nice colour photo and brief English text, the other has black and white photos of everything in that collection – shoes, belts, etc., with German text. I’d spent considerable time scanning it all in to my computer, aiming to eventually translate the German (fairly simple German, except the odd technical word) etc., when someone crashed the hard disk the day before I was backing it up to CD. I’ve been a bit slow getting energy to do all that again. Anyway, the photo looked kinda violet/indigo to me. It’s probably one of those borderline cases that depends on the lighting, which means it maybe could be dyed with woad?
I did post a color image of a green, that looks to be somewhere between jade and emerald to me!
Wow it does, thanks Katherine! (BTW if you ever can’t get easy access to a book, ask if I can get it, especially if it might only have a few relevant pages. the university 3 libraries I have easy acess to are limited, but sometimes have funny obscure stuff in their collections that I can raid for free.)
~ Teffania / Tiffany Brown
Message #870, February 27, 2003