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Long Meg & Her Daughters

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Littlestone L
Littlestone Apr 21, 2006 21:54:53
Replying to Rune

Organic blues from woad certainly. Pure organic greens however are rare (considering the source is vegetable) and are usually the combination of a yellow and blue dye. Natural organic dyes are not very stable - OK for clothing but not much use elsewhere.

Fluorite as a pigment is a new one on me; do you have any more info on that - sounds interesting.

R Rune
Rune Apr 22, 2006 00:07:46
Replying to Littlestone

Hi Littlestone,

<i>Fluorite as a pigment is a new one on me; do you have any more info on that - sounds interesting.</i>

It was just a guess, I have a large non-crystalline dark lump of fluorite which I photographed this afternoon for something entirely different. It's strongly pigmented, a lot darker in reality than in the photo, softish, easily available and I was musing aloud about it being a pigment candidate, rather than having any direct knowledge aside from minerals being ground up and used.

Have a look at this, you'll need the Crystals album, last photograph, sorry, can't do a direct link and compared to the other folks on this site, I'm really not a good photographer.

http://community.webshots.com/user/runemage

The pink stuff behind it is rose quartz, (currently called lavender quartz because of its deep colour) far too hard to grind for pigment!

Rune

M moss
moss Apr 22, 2006 08:07:41
Replying to Littlestone

"Pure organic greens however are rare"

Not necessarily, there are a lot of wild plants that would probably give up their dye without the use of inorganic mordants, yellows in particular, blackberries and elderberries can yield different colours, roots also yield colour. The mordant for woad is of course urine which leads one to speculate if it could have been used in other dyeing processes. I reckon prehistoric women would have experimented....