Dyeing

It is after midnight again and I am very tired. haugtussa and I have been dying silk yarn (for embroidery and possibly tablet weaving) since 5.30 this afternoon. We've dyed with cochineal, madder and onion peels and onion peels + iron sulphate. Some other time we will dye with weld and also overdye some of the yarn with indigo as well as using just indigo. We now have lots of silk yarn in different thicknesses, in purple, pink (including shocking pink), berry red, bright red, all shades of orange, bright yellow and different shades of brown. They are all very beautiful. We also dyed thin silk chiffon in onion peels and in a mix of madder and cochineal to make yellow and a soft pink veils later.

Edit: I should add that it is haugtussa who knows anything about dyeing, she's done that a lot and sells hand dyed silk yarn at markets and to other re-enactors. I was just a student and helper. And cook.

I've finished a chapter!!

Really, I have. It's the same that was semi-finished before I went to London. It now has a summary and conclusion and all that's missing is some text in the section about the materials in clothes, since I haven't worked on all the data concerning that yet. I have written most of it because I have a good general view of the development, I just need the statistics done. Now I'm going to revise a 65 pages chapter on the garments found in the documents. Both of these chapters are due on the 13th of June. Then I will start working on the clothing materials as well as writing an article for a small anthology. It will consist mainly of a small part of chapter 7, on clothes and gender, but I need to add some stuff and rewrite some of it.

This is otherwise a very annoying time of the year. For the coming two weeks high school students are having their exams and celebrate this by driving around the city center the whole day and half of the night beeping constantly. The faculty of humanities is situated in the center of town and even though there are some houses and a park between us and those idiots it is impossible to work if you have the window open. So one has to choose between being very hot or listen to eight hours of honking car horns. GOD! I HATE THEM!