By chance, I've stumbled across a new repository framework - called EUDAT. It's intended to help researchers, both institutionalised and independent, to save, store, publish and share their research and research data. That sounds fantastic, and it's now on my list of things to look at it a little more, and see if that might be a good thing for the Textile Forum data that's been accumulated.

As the documentation and info I've already looked at tells me, it is based on the Invenio software, which, to my delight, is also free and open source... and might be a solution for my (still unresolved) photo database problem. Another thing to look into. Seems like it will not get boring around here!

Well, maybe not completely - we took a little break this noon to watch one of our friends give a presentation. But otherwise - it's cold outside these days, and there's even some snow, as is fitting for this time of year. The little cat likes to hang out on my desk, lying on my right arm and occasionally "helping" by adding a lot of empty spaces, or äääääää, or whatever her paw happens to hit as she stretches (or walks off, across the keyboard, of course). 

While she is chilling, I am trying to keep up with the things on my list - wrapping up Forum stuff and working on the museum projects that I have in the pipeline. And, of course, the shop. As November is almost over, it's high time to send the monthly newsletter... and in theory, being a good shopkeeper and marketing person, I should (have) put in there a lot of things to animate people to buy stuff for Xmas. 

But... well. Just a few days ago, there was all this "Black Friday" and "Black Week" madness, with ad bombardments everywhere and gazillions of "great deal!" newsletters, and I'm already being bombarded as well with reminders that Xmas is coming up and I might want to buy this or that as a present. And frankly, I'm quite sick of all this demand to be a good consumer and buy, buy, buy. It's just too much. 

So I did decide not to do the usual pre-Xmas-extra advertising this year - the newsletter is mostly like any other one during the year. I've never been very good at tooting my own horn for the stuff I sell, but my hope is that it will speak for itself well enough to keep things going. And maybe I'll feel more like "hey! go buy this!" next year again, when the consumerism craze of the end-of-year has passed... 

The dyeing instructions and experiment protocol have been successfully tested:

The results? Two beautifully dyed objects, one set of instructions with notes and corrections, and I've already managed to do the fixing-up and the instructions are sent out. 

(The result this time turned out to be a rather orangey colour, by the way. That might be due to the pre-treatment, or a different batch of madder, or the different alum, or the water, or whatever. Madder. Might drive one madder and madder...)

Now it's time for me to wait and see what will happen. I'm already looking forward to getting the first of the samples and be able to compare them to the original reference. And, well, I guess I could also think about when to start my own homework...

To make sure that all the instructions for the madder dyers influence test are as accurate as possible, and easy to understand, there's a little test run taking place. Thankfully, the Most Patient of All Husbands has taken on the task, so I have the benefit of getting the stuff tested by a non-dyer.

The instruction test is simulating the real thing - so there's Erlangen tap water being used instead of de-ionised water (but at least I filled it into a bottle that once held de-ionised...) and the madder is some that I harvested (and then steamed, and then cut it up and dried some, and then ground it and dried it some more) and the alum is ammonia alum and not potassium alum... but for testing the how-to, it will all do.

The madder has been soaking, and it looks a promising deep red:

Next will come the mordanting, and then the dyeing, and then I'll fix up the experiment protocol with the missing info and necessary corrections, and then... off it will go to the volunteers. Hooray!

Here's a better picture of the outcome of our dyeing tests for the variations between different madders and different waters: 

So. Can you see differences? What do you think? 

When you're working with colours, definitions or descriptions of them are always an issue. Green as grass, blue as the sky, dark as the night - even these descriptions, time-honoured and always nice, include a large variety of shades.

It would be nice to have a good, solid way of describing colours, wouldn't it? Well. There's electronic colour checkers, there's colour space charts, and then... there's human beings.

One of the little side shenanigans we did at the Forum was test how well a colour checker fan works. These are printed colours with a defined number according to a system - you might be familiar with the RGB system, or have heard of CMYK. There's a number of other systems as well, but in this case, that's only relevant insofar as the number you'll write down as your colour name will change.

We asked people to sit down and try to describe the colours of some of our madder sample dyeings with help of the fan. (Thank you to everyone who did!) Everyone who I asked about how it went agreed on it being difficult, as the printed colour patches were not really matching the actual textile colours.

Well. Having had quite the experience with how dissimilar measurements done on the spinning angle were if taken by different persons, I was a bit suspicious from the start on how well the colour fan might work (or not). It would be really, really nice if it did, making the description of colours easier, and more reliable, and hope springs eternal. 

This is what we had as one set of samples:

It's a rather bad picture, but hopefully you can see that there's a little difference between some of the samples. Make up your own mind on how many groups you'd see regarding darkness/colour depth - myself, I see three in the originals and four in this (bad) picture, with the one to four pieces in the group having no discernable difference.

Here's the clincher: The cloth patches were not sorted by darkness when participants were doing the colour checking and matching. And... as a result, we had the same colour number assigned to the darkest shade and the lightest shade by different people.

Which, to me, means that this simple method is, unfortunately, out - and that you should not trust the colour numbers given by "comparison-by-eye" using a colour fan tool. 

Sigh. It would have been so nice, wouldn't it?

I'm back from the Forum and my recuperation afterwards - much needed, and much appreciated, and now it's tackling all the emails that have accumulated, and sending out all the orders that came in, and then... back to normal work plus the Forum homework.

And oh, there's homework. We ran a total of four experiments and one dyeing test during the week (yes, madness indeed). One was the continuation of Micky Schoelzke's exploration of fake purple that she started last year (you can read about that on the Forum homepage). Then I had the splendid idea of trying out mordanting with horsetail (equisetum arvense), which was an experiment on its own. Then there were the dyeing tests - a first trial at reconstructing some early modern recipes for dyeing knitted caps, with the three great providers of red: madder, cochenille, and kermes. Micky had an experiment with madder as well, a spin-off from the fake purple research, using madder root that had been pre-treated in different ways.

And then, of course, there was the Madder Baselines experiment. We had the staggering number of 35 different water samples for testing the dyeing outcome and the influence of the water on the dye result... so that was huge, and ate up all the time available, and then some. Especially since the experiment went not just as planned.

It was rather clear when we were getting ready that the amount of goods was very large for our small beakers - but there's the decision to make between having very small samples (where any fluctuations in amounts of madder, or the quality of the teaspoonful you are using compared to the quality of the second teaspoonful for the next sample will make more of a difference the smaller your samples are) or having larger samples and larger amounts of dyestuff but running the risk of uneven dyeing. 

We decided to go for larger samples and the risk of spotting... which, in retrospective, was not a good decision, as spotting was very, very prominent. So we went for the afterbath - which was another mordanting run, and another dye run. That did not satisfy us with the results, so we decided to use the waters that we had more of to do a second run, with more liquid and thus less of a risk of uneven dyeing. Another batch of samples to make, another mordanting run, another dye run.

And then we had to test the different madders that we got - mordanting and dyeing in de-ionised water, to make things all even and comparable. 

Long (very long!) story short: We did get to see some differences depending on the waters used, but they were not as pronounced as we would have expected them to be. There's also a difference between the different madders. Now the last factor that would need to be checked is... the Human Factor. Because the speed with which you heat your dyebath, the temperature, they also might make a difference. 

Fortunately, most of the Forum participants volunteered in taking part of this experiment, and dyeing a sample at home. Which is why this happened today:

I harvested some more madder from the garden yesterday, and today it was dried enough (I sped the process up a bit) to be ground, and now it can finish dyeing... and then there'll be a test run of my instructions for the volunteers, and then these can be sent out. 

And then we'll see. I am very, very curious if there will be differences visible - after all, it's the same madder, the same samples, the same mordant, the same instructions, and the same water (de-ionised water for the win!). 

What's your guess? Will we have differences? Or will it all look the same?