Nathan Robinson wrote: | ||
It's in a great deal of period art. Further, it was not a difficult color to achieve in fabric. The dye was readily available. |
It's an easy (though expensive) colour to achieve in fabric with kermes or chochineal dyes, but to get them fast you need to boil them with a mordant, which obviously you can't do to leather.
You can fairly easily dye alum-tawed hides with cochineal because the alum is one of the things that will turn the dye red to begin with, but for pit-tanned leathers its much harder. The surviving red dye recipes for leather I'm familiar with are all berry-based and are extremely fugitive to light. It's complicated by the fact that the tannins in the leather itself will darken on exposure to light too. The standard way to get brown leather was to oil it and leave it in the sun.
I guess the bit I haven't worked out is whether alum tawed hide makes good sword grips or not. It makes pretty good medieval dress shoes but it isn't stable in water so it's not great for outdoor shoes unless you're one of the really rich types who doesn't need to worry about that sort of thing.
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Please allow me to tell you that you're being much too harsh on your skills... a trait we all probably share! |
Thanks :) You're right, it's probably a bit harsh to say I'm not happy with the grip, there are bits of it that worked very well, the texture is good, the seam is good, and the skived and rolled edges at each end came out good and clean. It's probably more accurate to say I'm not entirely happy with it. If I bought a new sword whose grip had those flaws I'd expect the maker to fix them and since I have more of the leather, glue and cord and I'm not adverse to learning experiences I don't have a big problem with pulling it off in a couple or three months time and redoing it when I'm ready to fit the chappe over the scabbard mouth. If I weren't just about to move cities and change jobs I'd probably have started work on the scabbard first.