Earlier this month I wrote about historian Ruth Goodman making gold thread in Secrets of the Castle, and how it inspired me to have a go, using gold leaf (which I have in stock) instead of gold foil (which I haven’t), even though it is much thinner and can’t ordinarily be picked up to be cut into strips. Well, the time has come to reveal whether Ethelnute, my medieval king, will have his gold collar enhanced with home-made gold passing thread!

No.

Oh all right then, I’ll give you the longer version. The first thing was to choose my materials. I have both gold and silver leaf at my disposal, but the original project made gold thread and moreover only my gold leaf comes on a tissue paper backing – the silver leaf is just that: very very thin silver that flutters at the slightest breath. No need to make things unnecessarily complicated for myself, so the choice for gold leaf was quickly made. Because of the tissue backing, you can cut this with scissors, and the pictures shows a thin strip cut ready for applying to a silk core.

For that silk core I chose Kreinik’s yellow silk couching thread. It is a good idea to have a core that is similar in colour to the metal surrounding it for the same reason that it is a good idea to use padding felt of a similar colour when doing chipwork: if there are any inadvertent gaps, they won’t show up so badly!

Now to detach the gold from its tissue paper and attach it to the silk thread. The first part turned out to be much easier than the second… I tried rolling it as shown in the documentary; it clung only to my fingers. I tried wrapping it around the core; this produced the same result as for Ruth and Eve Goodman – untidy tinsel.

I had one trick left: heavy breathing. When applying gold leaf in calligraphy, on illuminated initials etc. you first apply a ground, both to provide something for the gold to stick to and to give it lift – like felt padding for the metal threads in goldwork. Traditionally this is done with gesso but very good results can be obtained with common white PVC glue. The point is that the ground is allowed to dry completely, going non-sticky (this bit is rather counter-intuitive). You then huff on it to make it slightly sticky again with the condensing moisture from your breath. Now I wasn’t going to coat my silk in PVC glue (although by this time I was sorely tempted) but I had a vague hope that even without a coating my breath might produce just that little bit of moisture that would coax the gold leaf off its backing and onto the silk, and that once it was on the silk it would stay there. So I huffed and I puffed and it didn’t.

By the end of the experiment the gold leaf had attached itself to my fingers, to the dining table, and (in a much smaller proportion and rather untidily) to the silk thread. It soon became clear that the attachment was much more successful in the first two cases than in the last one – whereas the fingers took quite some scrubbing, and the table needed a judicially applied fingernail to dislodge every last bit of 23-and-a-half carat glitter (there is still some left several days after the event), the gold precariously clinging to the silk thread needed a mere puff of breath to fall off (and attach itself much more firmly to the table).

So was it a wasted afternoon? A needless squandering of time and precious metal? No, I don’t think so. For one thing, I tried, and so now I know for a fact that gold leaf is too thin for making gold thread. For another, it was rather fun to try! It used about 1/16 of one sheet of gold leaf from a 25-sheet pack which I bought well over two decades ago for 80 guilders (less than £30); a considerable expense back then, but given that I still have about half of it left after all that time, using some of it for an enjoyable learning experience seems a sound plan. And finally, think of the strain on my self-control if, having seen the documentary and having these materials in the house, I hadn’t tried – I’m sure it was much better for my health and happiness to allow myself this indulgence .

A few days ago a fellow member of Mary Corbet’s Facebook group posted a link to the documentary Secrets of the Castle, in which historian Ruth Goodman attempts to make goldwork thread (having dyed her own silk threads earlier in the programme) for a small Opus Anglicanum project.

And this was proper gold thread! None of your .5% or even 2%, this is the stuff of Exodus 39: “They hammered out thin sheets of gold and cut strands to be worked into the blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen – the work of skilled hands”. True, Ruth and her daughter Eve did not do the actual hammering; they wisely started with gold foil that someone else had prepared earlier. But in the clip (the link above will take you to the start of the embroidery segment) you can see them do the cutting and “working into”. What I found fascinating was that what seemed the most obvious method (wrapping the gold around a silk core) actually produced an expensive and unusable bit of untidy tinsel; what was needed was to gently roll the thread across the gold strips, a bit, I suppose, like rolling a cigar.

That made me think. Ruth Goodman pointed out that the foil they were working with (which was apparently originally made by flattening gold coins between sheets of leather) was thicker than your usual gold leaf – but apart from that it’s the same thing. And I have some gold (and silver) leaf left over from the days when I did calligraphy and illuminated initials. And plenty of silk threads to use for the core.

Now gold leaf is incredibly fragile and very difficult to handle; at the slightest provocation (or none at all) it will stick to your fingers and disintegrate into a fine gold dust covering your finger tips and anything else it touches. Cutting it with a knife as shown in the clip would normally be out of the question, but fortunately I had the foresight to buy my gold leaf attached to backing paper, which means that you can actually cut it with scissors. Unfortunately it is taken off its backing by pressing it, together with its backing, on to the slightly sticky ground that you first apply to your paper (or vellum or parchment if your budget runs to it) – and there is no stickiness applied to the silk core. Even so, wouldn’t you agree that it’s impossible not to try, now that I’ve seen this documentary ? Watch this space!

As I mentioned last time, we’ve been sorting through things at my parents-in-law’s house. And as anyone who has done this will know, you invariably come across surprising things when sorting out a house – a packet of stock cubes for saffron rice with a best before date of November 1997 being one of the more unexpected.

But even more unexpected, and a lot more interesting, were two pieces of fabric carefully wrapped in tissue paper: a dark pink rectangle and a yellow square, backed with silk (some of it rather worn), and on the front…

I can’t quite work out whether this is heavily tarnished goldwork, or whether it started out as silverwork; in real life the metal is a bit yellower than in the pictures. The metalwork on the pink piece is mostly made up of wire chips – wire or bright check, and smooth or rough purl (after all this time it is difficult to tell whether it’s the shiny or the matt version) – and very fine passing applied over what is probably cardboard, as well as some spangles. The wire chips are sometimes attached straight (possibly over padding) and sometimes arched over other chips; the spangles are attached with small chips of wire check.

The yellow piece likewise has a great amount of wire chips (some of it used to create outlines), but also passing couched in bundles in a sort of weaving pattern, and a very fine metal thread (also passing?) used for chain stitch filling. The chain stitch filling forms the background for free-standing wire loops; there are no spangles.

My mother-in-law unfortunately couldn’t remember where they came from – at first she thought they might have come from her grandparents’ house, but then she wasn’t sure. She did remember, however, that they used to be the centre pieces on the dining table at Christmas. They must have looked gorgeous in candlelight when they were in their prime; even when we found them after all those years they showed a good bit of sparkle in the sunlight.

And that wasn’t the only gold: while looking through my mother-in-law’s thread chest (one of the pieces of furniture she’s taken with her, and a veritable treasure trove of threads, beads, ribbons and embellishments) I came across a reel of Jap, a hank of very fine passing, and some more Jap in what very likely started life as a hank, but was now a tangle. Yes, she said, she’d bought those once, probably for a workshop or class, but (sounding slightly deprecating) they weren’t real gold; actually it would have been surprising if they were, as even the “purest” goldwork threads that are readily available contain only 2% gold, most don’t get beyond .5% and Jap often contains no gold at all. But they are lovely and shiny, and these were definitely “proper” goldwork threads. I gratefully accepted them, bundled together in a plastic sandwich bag.

Incidentally, did you notice the difference in colour between the various golds? Although the two Japs turned out to look more similar once I’d wound the tangle onto an empty reel. Which, by the way, was quite a job!

It’s a good thing Jap is one of the more resilient goldwork threads; even so, it got slightly damaged here and there in the untangling process. Fortunately, however, there is plenty left that is perfectly usable. Perhaps I’ll try some of it on a small silk flower I’m stitching at the moment – it’s a bit of an experiment anyway, and few projects aren’t enhanced by a bit of extra bling . A good opportunity to try out the translucent couching thread I got at the Knitting & Stitching Show as well; I’ll let you know how I get on with both.