Nicole Alderman

I did some experimenting last night. Since I have gum arabic, I tried it on the clay. It worked surprisingly well. I didn't have much white paint (and didn't want to make more), so I tried using slacked lime. This was pretty thick and tended to crack or chalk off, so I don't think it's the best option.

I'm honestly tempted to go for milk &/or paint. Milk is a pretty accessible binder, and lime is pretty common in many parts of Europe. Is there lime in Scandinavia? Do we have any evidence for milk paint in medieval Scandinavia?

The one downside to using milk paint is that the paint we didn't use goes to waste. Watercolor paints stay good (as long as kids don't mix the colors up), so there's a lot less waste.

I'm avoiding glazes because I couldn't find any examples of medieval spindles that were glazed (maybe there were some, but I couldn't find them). It seems like glazes were reserved for expensive items, and spindles generally weren't expensive in the medieval era. They were made of whatever people had access to (chalk, soapstone, clay, old terracotta tiles, lead, wood, bone, even old broken spindles). Which tells me that, if people painted them, they would have been more affordable pigments and easily accessible binders.

Natural slip (basically different colored clay in liquid to paste form can be painted on before a second (I believe) firing.

During my ancient history class last year, I had the kids use red ochre slip (red ochre pigment + clay-y water) on their pottery. We applied it before firing, and it worked quite well. But, I'm hoping for more color choices than that.

I know medieval people painted wood and lime plaster and stone. The tricky thing about paint is that usually washes off with erosion and time. So, it's hard to know what was painted and what wasn't....

Since R's are in water, they're already pretty mushy and hard to break up. I used a potato masher when I made my first batch of aldercone ink. I honestly don't know if it helped that much, but it was satisfying.

I think adding water and boiling again and then reducing is probably the most effective way to get more tannins out of them.

I've put most of my art wants on my Christmas gift list. Maybe I'll get lucky and someone in my family will buy them for me!

I've actually been snagging pewters stuff at thrift stores for a while, to use for "tin" in my world trading game (since it has so much tin in it). I really should test some of the pieces, though, because I don't know how many of them actually have lead.

I'm also really tempted to melt one down to use in a soapstone mold, since buying pewter online is so expensive. But, my antique-loving self is holding me back....

That makes sense! I'd known about tin and coal, but not about lead. I'm going to need to find some way to have pretend lead for trade in my Silk Road trade game later this year!

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Still trying to find painted ceramics. This doesn't seem to be a thing, at least not in the British finds. I found one ceramic tile that was painted with yellow clay slip and then glazed. Not what I was looking for, but interesting nonetheless!

My aldercone ink is always quite a bit lighter than the walnut ink, even after simmering it down a lot. I remember my first pot of aldercone ink simmered down to about a quart of ink, and it was still a lot lighter than the walnut ink:

the alder ink was evaporating in the jar while I made the walnut ink.

R ransom wrote:I'm going to let mine sit a while, maybe strain and add water and try again tomorrow.

That's what I did with mine this year. I actually simmered the aldercones a second time and then evaporated everything. I still only ended up with about a pint of golden brown ink.

Failing that, some rusty metal will make a colour.  

You can also try cracking up an iron pill and using that! This worked surprisingly well on my walnut ink (I didn't try it on the alder, because I like the alder.) The iron pills I used were Ferochell, Ferrous Bisglycinate Chelate, but I'm assuming most iron pills would work.

r ransom wrote:The alder cones have a pleasant smell when simmering.  Somewhere between mulled wine and pre industrial cough syrup before they started adding all that sugar.

That will keep smelling nice for at least a week!

Walnut ink starts molding within a week (found mold in mine that I made last week, so I boiled it again and added clove oil. The class really liked the scent!)

I also found an old bottle of alder ink from about a year ago. I hadn't added clove oil, nor did I refrigerate it. It, surprisingly, had not gone moldy, but it did smell of vinegar/fermentation. So, I boiled that again, added clove oil, and added it to my pint of alder cone ink.

I just found this really cool site: Finds.org by the British Museum. There's a LOT more indexed there than on the normal British Museum site. I'm currently looking through all the early medieval spindle whorls. There's so many!

I'm honestly surprised at the amount of early medieval lead spindle whorls. Some are pretty, but many are very boring. After looking at over 100 spindles, 98% of them are lead. Is it because lead was used a lot in England, or just because they survive better? I'm guessing lead doesn't rust like other metals or break as easily as things like clay or stone?

My students will be studying the Viking Age while making their spindles. And, yes, the Vikings usually used stone for whorls...I don't have access to that much soapstone or other carvable stone, and it's probably pretty tricky to get the symetrical. So, we'll be using clay to make whorls instead. Lots of people in medieval Europe used clay, so I'll just explain to the kids about soapstone and why we're making them out of clay.

Still, I want to show the kids as many Viking spindle whorls as possible to take inspiration from. They're weirdly hard to find, though! But, I did find Helg Reproduction makes stone spindle replicas and apparently shows which find they were based off of in his facebook page. For now, here's a link to his page to do more research: https://helgreproductions.com/2025/02/05/soapstone-spindle-whorls/. One is even painted. He went with tempera paint, but I didn't see anything in the primary source about the type of paint binder.

My medieval history class will be making drop spindles, making the whorls out of clay. Since glazing spindles wasn't really a thing anywhere during the Viking Age, I was thinking of painting them afterward. But, what type of paint to use?

Did anybody paint clay objects after they were fired? Are there museum examples to look at?

What types of binders were used back then? Egg tempera, milk paint, gum arabic, linseed? Which ones did the Vikings use? (Since we'll be studying the Vikings during the time we're making the spindles)

All but the gum arabic of those would only be good for a day (or two in the case of linseed), so how much pigment will I waste if we make paint on the spot and it doesn't all get used up?

Which leads me to wonder, how does gum arabic do on clay? Did anyone ever try it in the medieval times?

If anyone finds/knows anything, I'd love to learn about it! If I find out anything, I'll try to post it here in this thread to help others.