Month: April 2024

Inner Bark of the Apple wood

| msvarnyk

Today was an interesting practical exploration day. Someone invited me to their back yard and showed me what is actually the “inner bark” of the apple tree. We explored removing it from the trimmed apple tree branches, and now I have some experience. For instance, I know that there is no point trying to remove it (or even the whole bark) from the branches that have been cut a while ago, it is much easier to strip the bark (and separate the inner bark if needed) from the freshly cut branches.

The apple tree dyestuff I have purchased is always whole branches, and they still work, but for some reason all of the late 19th century Ukrainian pysanky-related sources insist that the bark should be stripped from the branches and only the bark should be used for the dye. Korduba even uses a Ukrainian word which I do not know and have not found in the dictionaries, and I am guessing he could be referring to the inner bark:

To obtain the yellow dye, from the wild apple tree peal the bark with sumat’ [inner bark?], soak for some time in room temperature and then hot water and the dye is ready. … Because of that yellow dye is everywhere called as “apple dye”. Besides that, in all villages it is told that earlier and in some places even today the yellow dye is obtained from onion skins by boiling them with water. But that dye looks more reddish and never looks as nice as apple dye. (Korduba 175, my translation)

There are also old Estonian recipes using apple tree bark (and maybe also specifically the inner bark) to make the dyes for fibres, and Estonians had some very interesting ways of processing the barks to achieve strikingly different results, so I have heard (and also have seen some amazing photos or current experiments).

We also went and checked out one of the three claimed “wild apple” trees in Tartu, because it was nearby, and have found out in quite an interesting turn of accidental communications, that the specific tree was entered into the database by mistake, it is not wild. So the “wild” aspect of the apple tree bark used for dye is still inaccessible to us. Let’s see how that aspect unfolds.

Brighter Red Brazilwood

| msvarnyk

Something I have noticed in these first experiments with brazilwood dye is that after the last step of the process, the removal of the wax, the red becomes considerably darker and acquires a more brown sort of a tone. I don’t know a reason for this, I was wondering whether it is affected by the color of the wax (I have been mostly using the blue-coloured wax), so I used mostly white on some of the eggs, or than maybe it was the residue of iron on the egg surface (and so I had an egg without black, hence without iron), or maybe it is just the temperature or exposure to fire when the wax is taken off (I’m removing the wax here in the most common way by melting it off next to the candle flame).

Conclusion so far is the following: I don’t think it’s the wax color, and I also don’t think it’s the iron residue, but I still don’t know what it is. It does so happen that the brighter red I have on the egg didn’t have iron on it, but it was also the last one so far, so I have dyed it to a much lighter shade initially, and it has also changed the tone a bit during wax removal. So we will have to see, maybe we’ll find something out with time.

Yellow – elderflower with alum, red – brazilwood with alum. It’s Kulzhynskyy X-10 (683) village Vyrlook, Radomyshl area, used to be Kyiv governorate, now in Zhytomyr oblast, year 1894. I already did an egg from this village last fall, and will do it again, and also maybe some other eggs from that village, they are cool!

Kursk with Brazilwood

| msvarnyk

And the last post in today’s posting spree. Three eggs from Kulzhynskyy II-5,8,15 (egg ## 44, 56, 82), Kursk area and governorate, Sloboda Kozatska. These eggs are beautiful and I love them, I have written some before (not these three, it was the first time for these, and I think they might turn out better second time around). These eggs were written in 1891 by a peasant woman Pelageya Aleksandrovna Natarova, who was originally from the village Tazov of Kursk area.

The story of Kursk area eggs is quite unusual, because we generally believe that Russians did not write eggs, however Kulzhynskyy says that the population of all there areas in and around Kursk is predominantly “velikorusskoye“, that is, Russian. He mentions about the eggs acquired in the town of Kursk at the market (so not the ones I have here) that they are written mainly by the old-believer women presumably from the villages and are unknown to the town women. He never says directly that these were written by Russian women, and I don’t know whether old-believers were all necessarily ethnically Russian. What he does say (and that is also quite obvious from the images themselves), that the Kursk area eggs are very detailed, fine, and unlike any other area eggs.

So yea, a bit of a mystery and some potential controversy.

Yellow – elderflower with alum, red – brazilwood with alum, black – logwood with iron.

Brazilwood without the yellow

| msvarnyk

Here is how brazilwood red (at least this batch) looks like without the yellow underneath, directly on white. This egg was dyed red at the same time with the first brazilwood egg, but it was sitting in the carton waiting for me to decide what exactly I was going to do from Kulzhynskyy with the first color being red (that is rather unusual and drastic, since almost always the first color, the color of the main lines, is white). The black is logwood with iron. Technically it should be possible to get the black from brazilwood with iron (one of the previous eggs was done that way), but by the time I was finishing this one, my iron/brazilwood bath was not cooperating sufficiently well.

I tell you, trying to replicate the 19th century catalogue eggs with natural dyes is a whole different story than just writing eggs as you please and dyeing them with natural dyes. Especially this new/current project of mine, where most of the time (except during the warm-up) I am trying to limit myself to the dye sources that Kulzhynsky mentions in the text of the catalogue. It is a challenge! 🙂 Though I am not complaining.

This is Kulzhynskyy XXVII-16 (egg # 1897), village Bujaki, Bielsk area, Grodno (Hrodna) governorate, currently the village seems to be in Poland close to Belarus border, in year 1895 when this egg was acquired the population was mixed Polish-Belarus.

Apple, Brazilwood, Logwood and etch

| msvarnyk

This is the second of the brazilwood eggs I completed, and I quite like it. The first dye here is yellow (rather than white, which is quite unusual) it’s applewood chips with alum, then red is brazilwood with alum, then black is logwood with iron, and then vinegar etch to white. Kulzhynsky IX-4 (586), rozheva (“of rosette, or rosette-like”), village Chudnovtsi, Lubny area, Poltava governorate, 1894. At that time it would have probably been etched with kvas (fermented sour liquid made of vegetables or grains), I etched this one with household vinegar.

brazilwood red over
applewood yellow
logwood black
vinegar etch to white
after wax removal
image in the catalogue
description, egg #586