HERB - woad musings

[Kathleen Keeler]

For your amusement--
Hurry The Woad Plant and its Dye 1930 lists (p. 45-6) Plowright's 4 possible
ways Britons dyed themselves:
1) by infusing fresh young woad leaves in hot water, adding wood ashes and
washing themselves with the liquid
2) Adding an excess of lime water or by slaking quick-lime in the infusion.
(Gives green)
3) By rubbing themselves with the juice of the woad plant.  In this way they
might dye their skin black, as the 'woadmen' still dye their hands when they
are cropping and balling woad
4) By infusing woad plants in hot water, adding some lime water, then drying
the precipitate, to get nearly pure woad indigo, with which they could either
tattoo themselves or smear their bodies with the help of oil
  Or more likely that they first produced a crude form of woad vat and tattoed
their bodies with the scum that rose to the surface during the process of
dyeing

An even simpler plan, according to Plowright:  infuse woad leaves in hot water,
keep mixuture hot all night on the hearth.  Add some quicklime, get a crude
form of dye

I was interested to find that pastel is an old name for woad
(because the drying balls of leaves looked like loaves?!)

Hurry also tells the Legend of St. Ciaran.  Apprently in Ireland it was unlucky
to dye with woad while a man or boy was in the house.  So the legend has the
cloth streaky the first time whith Ciaran at home;  coming out white not blue
the second time;  finally blue when he gave it his blessing.
Hurry comments that failure to get a dye from woad appears to have been common.

Agnes


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