Scottish lesson

[vaneramos]

"Crottle is a symbiotic jynin o a fungus thegither wi a photaeseenthetic pairtner." ~sco.wikipedia.org

But before we get to that, some intriguing facts about clan tartans.

Last night djjo and I officially joined the Guelph Guild of Handweavers and Spinners. This has been a long time coming. The guild holds two meetings per month, one for weavers and one for spinners. I wanted to join several years ago, but Wednesday night choir practices precluded attendance. Since Danny moved here last summer (and I'm no longer singing), one thing or another has always waylaid us. Now hopefully can participate more regularly.

Margaret Stalker presented slides and stories from her trip (ca. 2000) to research Scottish tartans and natural dyes. Some of her findings were startling. Although tartans were worn in Scotland from the 16th Century onward, early patterns were associated with regions, not clans. What we consider traditional Scottish clan tartans did not appear until the early 19th Century. Apparently they were manufactured and popularized by one industrialist for the 1822 visit of King George IV to Scotland.

Another surprise: although synthetic dyes were not invented until later, traditional Scottish tartans utilized few native pigments. Scotland historically had good access to shipping routes. Consequently, tests of the oldest tartan textiles reveal use of exotic dyes such as cochineal red from Mexico, indigo, and other pigments originating in Asia. Margaret admitted her disappointment that few obscure Scottish plants came into the picture. On the other hand, this means craftspeople can replicate authentic tartans using natural dyestuffs readily at hand today.

Apart from this, Scotland does have traditional native dye plants. Margaret's trip also included a natural dye course on Harris, Outer Hebrides. This part of the trip sounded fascinating. She mentioned wildflowers, good birding—enough appeal to make us both want to visit someday. She described a native lichen which gives the distinctive smell and reddy-brown colours to traditional Harris tweed. It is protected against collection except by permit, but ironically grows abundantly on the rocky moonscape that covers much of Harris.

The lichen is called crotal or crottle. I looked it up this afternoon. Bewitchingly absent from en.wikipedia.org, it turns up almost incomprehensibly on sco.wikipedia.org. Flora Celtica records some references and uses of the genus. This particular species of crottle appears to be Parmelia omphalodes.

Another amusing thing happened at the meeting last night. At the end I went up to a lady to compliment her on a beautiful handspun, knitted shrug naturally dyed in a range of autumn hues and robin's-egg blues. After a brief conversation she asked me to bring such-and-such a dyestuff to the next meeting for her to buy. It took me a moment to realize she had mistaken me and Danny for Alan and John of The Fibre Garden in Jordan. Mixing yarn and facial hair confuses them every time.

Comments

[inishglora.livejournal.com]

Neat stuff. I'm enamored of the work of the late Taras Horodetsky who experimented with natural dyes for Ukrainian Easter eggs. The dyes are very subtle and earthy, being derived from root, berry and leaf. And these natural dyes compared to synthetic dyes always remind me of the difference between wildflowers and domesticated flowers and assorted cultivars, the former sometimes being subtle, and the latter often being spectacular. Has the human eye, or modern taste, gravitated toward the conspicuous or garish? I wonder.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. I wonder to what extent he used the same dyestuffs (such as indigo and cochineal) that are used to dye fibre naturally. So far the small about of dyeing I have done has been exclusively with natural dyes, mostly from local sources.