[Ansteorra] need doumunation on wood and leather burning

[Donna Nesbit]

I was going back through the hits on the list and saw this.  I know it is a little late, but if you look for information on the web using the term pyrography, you may find several things.  I did.
 
Penelope

--- On Sat, 8/30/08, Catie Clark <cat at rocks4brains.com> wrote:


From: Catie Clark <cat at rocks4brains.com>
Subject: Re: [Ansteorra] need doumunation on wood and leather burning
To: ansteorra at lists.ansteorra.org
Date: Saturday, August 30, 2008, 2:59 PM



> Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:03:32 GMT
> From: "willowdewisp at juno.com" <willowdewisp at juno.com>
> Subject: [Ansteorra] need doumunation on wood and leather burning
>
> I have been trying to find out about period use of branding or burning on leather or wood. Do any of you have any resources I could look at at?

Your Grace,

I have no info on branding/burning wood decoration in period.

There is a period technique in leather, but it is firmly associated
with gilding after the searing was done.  I do not think it would
be a stretch to use just the searing alone, but after over two and
a half decades of collecting references on leather and visiting
museums to see period leather artifacts for myself (you should
see the pile of photos I have!), I have never seen one leather
piece for any use that used searing as a decorative method in
its own right.  This doesn't mean it doesn't exist - it just means
I have never seen an example.  Unfortunately leather artifacts
from period have a low survival rate which makes it more
difficult to know what representative decorative methods were
in reality.  I think the extrapolation is plausible since the searing
of veg-tanned leather does causes a noticible shift in color contrast,
even in pieces dyed in dark colors, and during the blind-stamping
period of leather decoration in high-gothic Europe, it strikes me
as a natural extension of decoration already in use.  For example,
if I were judging a leather piece using searing by intaglio-cut
stamps done in the "international style of 1200," I would buy
into a well-made argument supporting the decorative motif on
this basis.

The easiest to find and most accessible documentation for hot
working is Edith Diehl's _Bookbinding_, ISBN 0-486-24020-7.
Not surprising, it's a Dover book.  There are other refs, like
John Waterer and Gunther Gall, but they are not easy to find
nor accessible (in the case of Gall, who wrote only in German).
(Several books by Waterer are now BACK IN PRINT for
the first time in 30 years, those of you who may be interested,
but they are not cheap unfortunately...)

The technique is called hot working or hot gilding.  It uses a
very specific set of tools.  It is a bookbinding decorative method,
though I suspect that it was used in other places (e.g./c.f., the
description of shoes with a gilded motif on the leather vamp
strip in {IIRC} the Museum of London's Shoes and Pattens
book).  If you have wondered at how they get those brilliantly
burnished, shiny, almost-reflective gold leaf bits on fancy leather
book covers, this is the method.  It dates at least back to the 13th
century, if not earlier (it's one of those things that likely followed
the crusaders home from the Levant).  Regardless, it is certainly
one of the "new" decorative techniques we see spread across
Europe during the "International Style of 1200" episode in the
High Gothic cultural period (12th-14th centuries).  Its advent in
Europe corresponds with the intaglio-cut "blind stamping" period
of leather decoration that you see everywhere prior to the
explosion of cuir cisele tooling out of central Germany in the 15th
century.  As period hot working is dependent of intaglio-cut
stamps, this makes a great deal of sense.

Prior to the advent of blind stamping, people were tooling their
leather for decoration (e.g. the famous Stonyhurst Bible).  It is
hard to tell if or how much of this was incised tooling, since for
any really good leather tooler NOT crippled by the use of the
modern swivel knife, the incising may be invisible by the time the
tooling is done (excluding cuir cisele where the incising is intended
explicitly to be seen as an integral part of the decoration).  When
the blind stamp "arrives," it puts the decoration of leather into the
reach of anyone who can afford a stamp.  These stamps were
intaglio-cut with a lot of flat area around the incising or engraving.
When you use one on some leather, the intaglio design becomes
a cameo relief surrounded by flat stuff all around it.  The blind stamp
appears in the 12th century (or sooner - I'm being too lazy right now
to go dig into the unpacked box of leather refs to double check).

The hot working extension of blind stamping works like this:
using a stamp specifically made of brass or bronze (and NOT
copper or silver or iron, for various reasons of chemistry),
you heat it in a non-sooty flame or on a hot plate.  When it it
hot enough (but not too hot or it will burn the grain of the leather)
you make your impression on DRY leather (not moist, which
is the case when you stamp leather cold).  The amount of hot and
the amount of "dwell" (ie pressure) is something that you can only
learn from experience and experimentation on your own.  This
makes an impression with some darkened constrast to the rest
of the leather.  The method continues to the gold: first you "paint"
the impression with glaire. Then you lay a peice of gold leaf over
the impression.  Taking the still hot tool, you restrike the impression
thus "frying" the gold leaf to the glaire on the surface of the already
sealed and seared leather.  When you remove the tool, the gold
is left in a shiny state which eliminates the burnishing step you need
to do when you water gild with gold leaf on gesso/vellum or gum
ammoniac on stiff bristol board.

Obviously, the hot gilding step is one step further than just
using the hot tool to sear and seal the leather.  To my knowledge,
this was only ever done with blind stamps in period.  Free-hand
design with a modern burnishing/branding tool was not done.
Why?  I think it's actually rather simple: you can get exactly the
same contrasting color effect if you know how to tool leather
properly, without the hassle of heating a tool.  Why use a harder
method involving special tools and heat when damp leather and a
knife and simple bevels and blunts will work just as well? (Contrary
to what Tandy and the Leather Factory want you to believe, you
can tool leather, even in a period style, even with the final product
looking very good, with a knife, a fork and a spoon, no kidding...
ask me to demonstrate sometime, when I have 20 minutes to
spare - or bribe me to come and teach a medieval leather tooling
class for your local group...)

Of course, the problem with blind stamps, hot or cold, on leather
is that you just can't bop down to Tandy's and pick up a few
brass or bronze intaglio-cut stamps that are of medieval design.
They just don't exist.  If you try to use a modern leather stamp on
a hot plate or in a flame, you'll blister the surface and ruin the tool.
If you use something you make out of a nail or any other piece of
iron or steel, it will react with the tannins in the leather and blister
the leather grain, thus ruining the leather. You could use the bronze
tips you get with a wood branding tool but the rounded tip is not
appropriate for medieval leather designs and the flat tips (circles,
diamonds, etc) are small and rather limited and you often have
to pay extra for them.  Also, my experience with such tools is that
the temperature is very difficult to control since none of them seem
to have any sort of heat control.  They're essentially a cheap heating
element with some threaded tips, like a cheap soldering iron with a
twist (and for twice the price). My solution, when I decided I wanted
to explore hot work, was to make my own cast bronze intaglio blind
stamps in a variety of gothic motifs - which is how I originally got into
casting and eventually became the foundry and jewelry casting
instructor at UC Davis (for my sins).

ttfn
Therasia, leather nerd
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