dyeing linen

[Matthew Amt]

Oh, a lot of that could simply have been fashion. Same thing happens today--look at men's suits! Especially juxtaposed with what business women wear. So while we all seem to feel that they COULD have dyed linen, it's just possible that they simply did not do so very often. But you can still do an awful lot with just bleached and natural threads: twills, stripes, checks, or even patterns using the same color in bands of Z-spun and S-spun threads. There's a linen fragment from a Villanovan grave that has a sort of terrycloth texture made by weft-looping, and it's entirely possible that was done in a pattern or motif of some sort rather than overall. So even plain white linen could be pretty exciting! (And it can be pretty snowy-white when sunbleached.)

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is just darn little linen surviving, and if it's all undyed we're kinda stuck with that. Artwork is only so much help because we can't necessarily tell whether it depicts linen or wool. So it's up to the literature to tell us what was done with linen.

Of course, the other problem is FINDING proper exciting fabrics! "What do you mean, JoAnn's don't have Z-spun/S-spun checks?? And no weft-loop designs at ALL?? Barbarians!!"

Gotta build a loom...

Matthew