Tag Archives: reading university

Woad Experiments

The use of woad to tattoo / paint / stain skin has long been disputed. Caeser (The Conquest Of Gaul) recorded: “Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod caeruleum efficit colorem.” – “All the Britons dye their bodies with woad [or glass] , which produces a blue colour…” Pliny backed him up by saying that the colour resembled “…that of Ethiopians.” But is this really woad?

Woad makes a poor paint as it has to be mixed with something else and tends to flake off flexible skin. It makes a worse tattooing ink!

So here it is, a woad dyed foot. Designs made with beeswax resist, in a similar way to batik. Who knows if anyone was doing this in 50 BC, but it’s certainly something to add to the possibilities!

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We shall see how it fades or wears off over the next few hours and days, watch this space! (and these toes…)

UPDATE:    The morning after…

No wear overnight and looking bluer in daylight:

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UPDATE: Blue feet on the BBC

We’re 2500 years ago, on the banks of the Thames near Reading…
Cut to 16.50 for woad dyeing.

“Making History” BBC Radio 4, 23/08/2016

Silchester Excavation Open Days

It was an honour to be invited to the last Silchester excavation open days. This Roman and Prehistoric excavation is a fantastic place for us to show some of the textile production techniques available to those people. We brought back the warp-weighted loom which we built for this event last year, and the students were very appreciative of an example of how the archaeology they were finding would have been used. We also modelled our new loom weights on finds from Silchester and Salisbury Museum.

Also many thanks to Kevin Standage Photograhy for giving us use of photos from his Silchester series.

www.reading.ac.uk/silchester/visit-the-roman-town/sil-visit-silchester-roman-town

Museum of English Rural Life Craft Fair

A delightfully friendly craft fair in the most wonderful of settings – the galleries of the museum itself. This fair was ideal for the early christmas shopper, and had some brilliant local craftspeople displaying and selling their work. We look forward to being involved with the museum more in the future, after their redevelopment.

http://www.reading.ac.uk/merl/whatson/merl-tradcraftfair2013.aspx

Silchester Open Days

We were honoured to be invited to Silchester for both of their Archaeological open days in July and August.

Silchester is a Roman town in Hampshire, which has been excavated for the last 17 years by Reading University. They have discovered both the layout of the town and the Iron Age settlement which was there before.

At the first open day we took our new quern stones, as well as some grain, and helped the visitors use them to make flour. We ground all the grain we took in just the morning, the stones never stopped turning. It was brilliant to see the opportunities families took to educate children about the origins of bread they eat every day. The archaeologists were also exhibiting a Roman quern from Verulamium (St. Albans), and having ours for demonstration really brought it to life for the visitors.

Before the second open day, we made a replica of an Iron Age warp-weighted loom. We set it up and started weaving at the open day, demonstrating how it worked. This helped to put the finds of loom weights into context for both the public and the students.

https://www.reading.ac.uk/silchester/