dyeing linen

[Crispvs]

Graham,

The optio you mentioned wouldn't be Caecilius Avitius and the museum wouldn't be the Grosvenor by any chance would it? I have often wondered about the reconstruction there but never got around to writing to the museum to ask if the blue was based on any sort of analysis of the original stone.

On the matter of undyed tunics, just to play around with an idea which has not been mentioned much on this thread so far, sheep come in a variety of shades and so undyed wool could be of a number of shades.
I grew up in rural New Zealand and whilst the majority of the sheep farmed in New Zealand are white Merino, Romney-Perrindale, Corriadale or Suffolk types, in the township I spent most of my childhood in, a number of older people still kept a few sheep of their own and these sheep were often various shades of black, grey or brown. I knew at least one woman who kept the wool from her sheep in separate bags so as not to mix up the shades and when she had enough of any one shade she would then spin it into a ball of woollen yarn. Like most women her age, she did a fair amount of knitting and when knitting with her own wool she would deliberately use the different shades of wool to make patterns in the garments she was making. Thus she could produce knitted woollen cloth with designs in several shades without having to resort to dyed wool.
In a similar way, I have a long sleeved tunic which I wear under my blue tunic in cold weather. As you can see from this picture (sorry about the poor light), it is hardly plain. Although in the case of fabric I made this tunic from I assume chemical dyes have been used, very few of the threads in it are of shades which could not be found naturally. Therefore I present this as an example of what could be considered to be an undyed tunic, from the point of view of cloth fragments found with no traces of dye.


Sorry to drag this a little OT.

Crispvs