Ella McCafferty Wright
missouri, usa
Stockholm 104-106
104. Collection of Woad
Cut off the woad and put it together in a basket in the shade. Crush and pulverize, and leave it a whole day. Air thoroughly on the following day and trample about in it so that by the motion of the feet it is turned up and uniformly dried. Put together in baskets lay it aside. Woad, thus treated, is called charcoal. (The last word in the recipe probably referred to its appearance. It occurs again in the title of No. 106.)
105. Dyeing in Dark Blue
Put about a talent of woad in a tube, which stands in the sun and contains not less than 15 metretes, and pack it in well. Then pour urine in and the liquid rises over the wood and let it be warmed by the sun, but on the following day get the woad ready in a way so that you (can) tread around in it in the sun until it becomes well moistened. One must do this, however, for 3 days together.
106. Cooking of Woad Charcoal
Divide the woad charcoal into three parts including that which is above the infused urine. Mix one of the parts in a convenient manner, put it in a pot and build a fire beneath it. You will perceive whether the wood is cooked in the following manner. When it boils, stir carefully and not m a disorderly fashion, so that the woad does not sink down and ruin the kettle. When the woad cracks in the middle the cooking is perfect. You should take away the fire from the underneath, but should nevertheless stir within the pot. Cool the under surface of the pot by sprinkling with cold water. Then take and put in the vat a half a choenix of soap weed. Pour enough of the cooked woad over (it), lay poles or reeds over the edge of the flat, cover with mats and build a moderate fire under it so that it does not boil over and (yet) does not become cold. Leave it 3 days. Boil up urine with soap weed, skim off the scum, and put in boiled wool. Then rinse off in a convenient manner, press out, card it, and put the wool in the dye liquor. When it appears to you to be right, take the wool out, cover up the flat again and build a fire beneath it in the same way. Put 2 minas of archil in the liquid, after you have boiled the archil and in doing so have skimmed off the scum. Then put the dyed wool in. Rinse off in salt water and cool it off. Dye in blue twice a day, morning and evening, as long as the the liquor is serviceable.
introduction:
These recipes, when taken together, contain almost all the necessary steps and processes to create woad blue that are used by fermentation woad dyers in modern times. When looking at these recipes, I identified steps of a “mother vat” or “starter vat” in 105, and steps to extract pigment through heating and rapid cooling of a woad solution in recipe 106, followed by a fermentation process, with soapwort used as an alkaline modifier to aid the fermentation and maintain correct pH levels. The only obvious step missing was aeration of the cooked woad liquid, although the papyrus does indicate “careful stirring”. However, as is the case with many of the recipes in these papyri, the translations can be difficult to interpret. The method described here is just one of many possible interpretations of these ancient instructions. I set out to see if I could create blue dye using the mother vat, woad charcoal, cooked woad, and soapwort as described, the only real differences being the scale of the materials involved, that I inserted an aeration step after the cooked woad was cooled, and that I was using a solution of ammonia and water to approximate urine.
1 pound of fresh woad was collected, shredded by hand, placed in baskets, turned, aired, and dried down to 7.3 oz. One third of this was separated and left to sit in a quart mason jar in a solution of ammonia and water with a pH of 10 to simulate fermented urine, and left in a home-made incubator at a temperature of 100-102 degrees Fahrenheit to reduce and become a “mother vat”. Once this vat showed signs of reducing (the liquid became a pale olive color and the vat developed a copper film across the surface after five hours in the incubator) the remaining dried woad leaves were “cooked” in 800 ml of hot distilled water with a pH of 7, (heated to steaming but not boiling) then the solution was rapidly cooled by submerging the container in cold water. After this, the “cooked woad” solution was decanted, the pH raised to 10 with the addition of ammonia (again, to approximate fermented urine) an aerated vigorously, although this failed to produce evidence of blue indigo pigment on the surface of the head of foam. This liquid was recombined with the cooked woad and then with the successfully reduced contents of the “mother vat” and ¼ cup of dried soapwort root. This mixture was divided equally between three quart jars to account for the increased volume, then placed back in the incubator to ferment and reduce. After an hour there were no signs of reduction present. At this point, the vats were corrected to a range of pH levels. Vat 1 had a pH of 9, Vat 2 was given a pH of 10, and Vat 3 a pH of 11. Samples of scoured Lincoln longwool lamb curls were added to each of the three vats, and 5 gm samples of homespun Shetland yarn were added to vats 1 and 2. The samples were left in the vats for 30 minutes, at which time they were removed and set aside to dry. Once dried, the samples were rinsed and dried once again before photography.
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