Dye-mania

All though I should be reading for yet another exsam I haven´t been able to keep away from the dyeing pots. Mikkel and I (and friends) are going on a market in the middle of July and I wanted to bring different things to sell. My friends Janni and I have decided that we are going to show natural dyening and the yarns can then be used for embroidery and nalebinding. The picture below is some of the colours that I have produced so far. I´m quite happy with the result and it have been quite easy to make. I have been woundering if I/Janni and I should make a small texts about plant dyening that people could purchase. There is often a large interest when we do this kind of thing and a lot ask how we do it.

The plantes that I have use for these colours are (from the left):
- Walnut (the browns - 1. and 2. colour bath)
- Madder (the reds - 1. and 2. colurs bath)
- Birch (the greens and the bright yellow - the greens have been treathed with iron, and taken up at different time in the colour bath, the yellow is 1. colour bath)
- Goldenrot - (the light yellow - 1. colour bath)
The white is the original wool yarn

These small duckets are 50 m yarn and would be relly good for embroidery and very fine knitting. I´m dyening on three differnt types of embroidery yarns and one silk, and have also plans on dyening some more normal yarns for knitting and nalebinding.

New embroidery

After I finished my final thesis for my medieval studies I just had to make some new embroidery. So I found some of the many woolen yarns that I have and decided for a pattern. I know that most of the geometric emberoidery were made with silks but those are quite har d to get in Denmark and at the moment I have so much beautiful natural dyed wool that I want to use. So for the moment all my embroidery is made with wool.

So far the embroidery is quite easy to do and I really like the colours and the pattern. I would actually say that this is my best piece to date. My plan for the embroidery is to make a small purse for my new 14th century outfit which I´m going to make soon.



The wool that I use is dyed with madder, indigo and tansy.

Projects in the making

As we have a whole lot of projects, but no finished items, we thought that a post about all of our "works in progress" would be in order.

There are a lot of things that needs to be done before we can be ready for this years season. First of all we need to sew a tent and make poles and tentpegs. Thats the major project.
Besides that we need to make some furniture (tables and benches) and some lanterns.

We bought the fabric for the tent a couple of weeks ago and are currently working on the "blueprints" for the whole thing. We should be ready to start cutting the fabric any time now.
The tent will be a so called "Norman style tent" and it will be 4m wide, 3m tall and about 6m long.
It will look something like this <-- Link to www.Matuls.pl

The "normann tent" should be a nice tent for both sleeping and shopkeeping. And we are going to partition the tent in at least one end, to make room for sleeping.

We also need some new clothes! So yesterday we went to visit some nice "vikings" living in Fillerup (a small town near Odder, where we live). They have a small shop dealing in all kinds of re-enactment goods, like fabrics, rope, whetstones and all sorts of other materiale. We bought some very nice 2/2 wollen twill and some woll thread. The quality is very nice and it has that sweet wollen smell :-) Here is a link to their shop: http://www.glaipnir.dk/

The fabric and thread should be coloured and sewn into a pair of footed hose and a new bocksten kyrtle.



The checkered fabric is for Louises' new dress. A late 14th century dress based on London findings and with fabric buttons. This will be her fist 14th century dress and she is quite looking forward to making it. The plan is also to make a new apron with smock, a head veil with frills and a new underdress without sleeves. So there are much to work on.

Louise is at the moment working on some new embroidery. She have tryed the pattern before which you can see at her old blog. This piece is going to become a small bag - maybe for her new out-fit.



We are looking forward to working on all these things... And a whole lot of other stuff. So even though the activity on this blog is somewhat low at this point, there should be plenty to read about in the future.

Dyeing before Christmas

I have been collecting onion shells for a while now and decided last night that I had enough to try a little dyeing. I had seen the great results on Slingerbult´s page and have wanted to try it ever since. So I decides on dyeing small bundles of embroidery yarn which had been treated with alum. All three went in and and they took in the colour great. So I tried using ironsulfur for one of them (? - the danish word is jernvitriol). The colurs of the ones that had only been in onion shells went quite orange and the one treated with iron in the end went dark brown. I must say that I´m really happy about the result although the yarn is a bit spottet. I think this is due to the alum and that I didn´t move the yarn as much as I should have.

So filled with succes I wanted to try something else. My dear friend Christopher bought safran to me last time he was in Spain. It is much cheaper there than here in Denmark so he was so kind as to bring some home for me. It is said to be one of the most expensive/luxuary colours in the middle ages, next to indigo and kermes. I tried with a small bundle of yarn again and use about 4-5 grams of safran. It really doesn´t take much before it dyes and the colour is very strong so be careful not to make a mess with it.

The end result is SO beautiful! The colour is very yellow and very rich. So it is easy to understand that people wanted that colour. It was a great succes and I going to have Christopher to buy me some more safran in Spain next time he goes.

I put the yellow next to some of the other natual dyed colours that I have in my embroideri kit at the moment. On the to next to the safran it is madder. In the bottom it is indigo and an yellow that has been dipped in indigo.

More Embroidery

I promissed that I´d show more pictures of the silk embroidery when it came along. Now I´m allmost finished and I am now woundering about that colour to put in side the little pouch.
I have found some red silk and so far that is the best option.


I have also started a new project. I were looking at the internet one day and came across a great idea on a blog some were. So I can´t say that the idea is mine. You can see the original idea at EWKA She have finished here pillow and it will be very intresting to see the end result.

The idea is to make a bed pillow with squares in white, red and greens in a checker pattern. There were shown a couple of 15th century pictures of bedding scenes and behind the back of the person in bed were the pillows.

So I have now started the project. I had it with me on a small winter market here in start November and found it to be so much easier to talk to people since the pattern is so easy. There is no complicated animals/geometric patterns and that ment that I actually hade some work done eventhough there were poeple to talk to.

My plan is that the pillow is going to be about 40 x 60 cm. I can´t quite decide if the pillow is going to be open in the ends with lacing or if it is going to be closed. I´ll have to look at some more pictures before I decide.

Medieval silk embroidery

Now it´s my turn to contribute with a new post to this new blog. I have made some embroidery in the last year - see my old blog
I found some really great silk on a market and have now started a new piece. The picture doesn´t really do the silk justice but you can get a sense the glow a bit in the white and the yellow. I´t makes a really great diffence to make the embroidery in silk and not in DMC - so that is the plan in the future (or to use a really thin or strong wool)