What is a clothlet?

When learning about pigments, you come across the word “clothlet”. So what exactly does that term mean? Generally, a clothlet is simply a small cloth infused with a colored pigment that is extracted from the cloth and makes a transparent paint or wash for use in illumination and drawing. These pigments seem to all be botanical. The pigment may be from flower petals, berries, or seed pods. To use them, the clothlets are moistened with a binder like liquid gum arabic or egg glair. These clothlets may be dried and saved between the pages of a book or in a little bag or stored still moist. Often these pigments are called turnsole, which can be confusing because turnsole can also refer to several plants (Chrosophora tinctoria and Heliotropium sp.) which turn towards the sun. Let’s take a look at a some of these clothlet recipes.

Let’s look at a Middle English recipe from Mark Clarke’s book, The Craft of Lymmyng and the Maner of Steynyng. I’ve translated it into modern English so it’s easier to read.

Pg 129. Sec. 22 (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.45 [#0375])

For to make turnsole.  Take the black elderberries or else blackberries that grow on hedges, and stamp them in a mortar and wring out the juice into a fair vessel, then take the alum glass and resolve it in clean water over the fire, then take the fair clothes of canvas or of broad cloth and dip them in thine alum water once or twice until they have drunk all this alum, then wring out the water completely and dry them, then dip them once or twice in the juice of the berries until they have a good fair color, then hang them up to dry, and when they be dry put them in a canvas bag until thou have to done therewith; and write as thou makes turnsole of blackberries, right so may thou make it of blue blooms.

Clarke, Mark. The Crafte of Lymmyng and the Maner of Steynyng. Eetso, 2016.

This is a fairly usual recipe for making a clothlet type pigment. The pigment material is crushed to release the juice. A cloth is impregnated with alum water and allowed to dry before being dipped into the colored juice. The clothlets are then dried and stored. The above recipe is pretty great, because it instructs that you can use elderberries (Sambucus sp.), blackberries (Rubus sp.), or blue flowers which are presumably cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus). Other materials that were often used include mulberries (Morus sp.), bilberries (Vaccinium myrtillus, relative of blueberries), corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas), and brome or dyer’s broom (Genista tinctoria).

While the above recipe is a good general recipe, there are a lot of differences in clothlet recipes. Let’s examine those differences!

Plant Materials Used

Lots of different flowers and berries were used. Most recipes created a blue to purple color. Elderberry, blackberry, mulberry, and bilberry were the most common purple colorants, but recipes also called for hellebore berries, poppies, and violets. At least one recipe described the triangular seedpods of Chrosophora tinctoria, often called turnsole, and the single recipe in On Divers Arts may be describing that plant due to the three colors that the recipe talks about making. For blue, cornflower was sometimes named, but other times I inferred that cornflower was the blue flower being used. Woad (Isatis tinctoria) was another blue plant material that was used, but only in conjunction with brazilwood. The two brazilwood recipes were very different than the majority of other clothlet recipes, so I’ll discuss them later. Iris (called lily), columbine (Aquilegia sp.), and buckthorn (Rhamnus sp.) were all used to make green clothlets. Yellow was an uncommon color to make, but could be made using unripe buckthorn berries or what the recipes call brome, which may be dyer’s broom or dyer’s greenweed. The major red colorant came from poppies, but I found two recipes for brazilwood, which were said to make blue clothlets. It’s those weird brazilwood recipes that we’ll talk about next.

Brazilwood

The two brazilwood clothlet recipes are very similar. Both start with red wine, brazilwood, ceruse (white lead) and another addition which are boiled down to half to create the liquid to soak clothlets. One recipe adds white flour and the other uses woad. The recipe calling for woad makes more sense in making a blue colored pigment, but brazilwood is pH sensitive and can change color according to the acidity or alkalinity of the mixture so blue might be possible or at least a purple. After soaking the clothlets in the liquid, the cloth is dried and stored. The recipes do warn that if the cloths are kept in the air, they will turn from to red, so if a blue color was achieved, it seems to be fugitive.

Poppies

Poppies were another plant material that used an unusual process most of the time. When the usual process of extracting the juice and dipping the cloth in the juice before drying was used and alum was added, the poppies seem to have created a purple color.

In order to get red, it seems that another process was required. The flowers were picked off the stems and repeated alternating layers of flowers then cloth were used in an earthen pot. This pot was sealed and buried in horse dung for months. When the illuminator wished to use the clothlets, he could take a cloth out of the pot, squeeze some liquid from the cloth into a clean vessel, and then return the cloth to the pot. For the majority of recipes, alum was not added.

Chemicals Added

A few chemicals were added to some clothlets apart from alum. The recipes in the Strasbourg Manuscript call for the addition of sal ammoniac in addition to alum in all recipes except for poppy. Recipes that may be using Chrosophora tinctoria call for quicklime, urine perhaps with wine, and one called for baked ashes which may have been to produce lye. Lye was also used to create buckthorn clothlets in De Arte Illuminandi.

Cloth Used

A vast majority of recipes call for linen cloths to be used when the type of cloth is specified. Canvas and broadcloth are mentioned a couple of times in Middle English recipes which tells us the weave, but not the fiber used. The Strasbourg Manuscript mentions that old veils or tablecloths may be use, but these may also be of linen.

Storing the Clothlets

When the cloths were not being kept wet in an earthen pot for poppies, the clothlets were generally dried and stored in a dark place out of the air. A couple times a canvas bag is mentioned in Middle English recipes that also call for canvas or broadcloth to be used as the clothlet. Clothlets are to be stored in a leather bag in one recipe. Several manuscripts call for a box or a wooden box as the storage device. Clothlets are also to be stored in paper or between the pages of a book. De Arte Illuminandi instructs that a glass jar to be used, but also says a box may be used.

Binder

A binder, a sticky substance that sticks the pigment to the page, may be used in the production of the clothlet or when soaking a dry clothlet to extract the pigment. When a binder is used, gum or gum Arabic is used more often or as opposed to glair.

To make a clothlet or another type of pigment?

Some manuscripts are full of clothlet recipes while others are devoid of them. The Strasbourg Manuscript and many Middle English manuscripts contain a wealth of clothlet recipes. Italian pigment manuscripts seem to be filled with recipes on making lake pigments, but few clothlets. This may be due to Italian artists wanting something different from their pigments, or merely that I have not found many Italian clothlet recipes yet. Il Libro dell’ Arte, written in fourteenth century Italy, has plenty of pigment instructions but no recipes for clothlets. The book does mention the use of clothlets on parchment or as washes for drawings.

Some manuscripts take the botanical materials that are sometimes used in clothlets and make a powdered pigment from them. One example of this is the Trinity Encyclopedia with one of the recipes here:

Recipe 48 Another manner of azure bice

Yet another manner of azure bice. In this way. Take nice white powder of burnt alabaster, and of nice white lead, and of nice Bagdad indigo that is bright, the same amount of each of these three, and mix them together with the juice of turnsole or else with the juice of blue cornflower. And when they are mixed well together, take them and put them in a urinal or else in a good large jordan of glass, and seal it fast, and put it to dry up in the sun or in the air. And when it is fully dried take it out of the glass, and grind it on a clean stone all to fine powder, and then it is done.

Clarke, M. (2018). Tricks of the Medieval Trades:: A Collection of 14th Century English Craft Recipes. Archetype Books.

I will continue to be on the lookout for clothlet recipes, but learned a great deal breaking down the recipes to really understand how clothlets were made, used, and stored.

For a link to my spreadsheet on clothlets, click here.

To see my collection of clothlet recipes, click here.