Making a leather pocket, part II and last

Stitching on the bottom panel went faster than I expected, and by Noon yesterday I was able to get to work on the final steps.

The original had, as far as I can guess from the photos, eight slits on each side for the drawstring.  I spaced my markings out 7/8 inch (22mm) apart and wound up with nine on each side.  However, this was a miscalculation; since the drawstring should start and finish on the outside, the final pair went unused.  I made the slits with a fresh pointed X-Acto blade, pushed through against a wood "working" block.  Older blades tend to break at the very tip, leaving the point squared-off - even if the squaring is so tiny that it looks pointed, it's not as good at piercing.  Working by eye, I made each slit around 5/8 inch (16mm) tall and spaced 5/8 inch from the top edge.  After penciling a guideline on the rough side, but otherwise working freehand, I added the decorative piercings below the drawstring slits with a hobby awl.  They weren't very visible, so I enlarged them with a thicker round scratch awl.

The final touch is a drawstring, in the form of a German buckskin thong from Crazy Crow, of which I have several, so I selected the thickest (some of them seem much too thin for this purpose).  It may be better to replace it with something less stretchy later.  A wool or soft linen/hemp string about a quarter-inch thick might work well here, though I might worry that they would wear at the chamois.  The German buckskin has the same texture and softness as the chamois, so my guess is they should wear at each other at about the same rate.

Making a leather pocket, part I

About a year ago, I discussed a leather drawstring pocket found at Elephantine, Egypt, and compared it to a readymade bag from Crazy Crow that I thought would make a passable substitute.  I felt at the time that it wouldn't be difficult to make a more authentic replica, and since I have a few spare days, it seemed like now was the moment to go ahead with that.

Based on the dimensions of the Crazy Crow bag, a replica should be a hair larger to accommodate things that you wouldn't want to leave unattended, including a phone, passport, wallet and spare cash.  I turned the readymade bag inside-out and measured its full height at 6.25 inches (17.22cm) and width at 4.75 inches (12.06cm), and increased them to 7 and 5 inches (17.78 and 12.7cm).  Admittedly, this effort is a little undone by the fact that I'm leaving a wider seam of almost 1/4 inch (0.63cm) due to my leather being so thin.  By my calculations, a bag with a 5-inch bottom panel should have a circumference (and thus length of the walls) of 15.71 inches (39.9cm); however, it might've been a good idea to leave about an inch extra to account for all the seams.  We'll see what happens.

The material is chamois from Ace Hardware.  Although named after a wild goat from Europe, American chamois is made from sheepskin, double-sueded and tanned with fish oil in the same manner as true buff (cowhide) and German buckskin.  As noted before, this process is an approximate substitute for the classic braintanning and similar fat-cured leathers of antiquity, differing only in the fact that leathers tanned with fish oil require no smoking, and thus are paler and smell different.

Normally I would suggest feeling all the pieces of chamois and selecting the heaviest one.  However, Ace has now begun to package their chamois in plastic bags, so it was no longer possible to confidently make a selection by touch.  To make the most of the material I got, I laid out the lines around the middle, where the hide is thickest.  It seems to me just barely thick enough for this purpose.  The leftovers can be used for facing small knife sheaths, adding sand gussets to chukkas, and other light-duty uses.

The only compass I currently have isn't sized to hold a normal writing pen, so I just scraped the pencil lightly against the suede and then tried to re-draw it freeform.  As usual, the lines are drawn on the rougher side, though it bears mentioning that the difference in texture between the two sides of a double-sueded fat-cured leather is, in my experience, much less than that between the two sides of most chrome-tanned splits (which tend to have a nice suede side and an ugly, stringy one).

 

Also as usual, stitching is done inside-out, with the rougher side and its ink lines turned inward when done.  Chamois is thin enough to push the needle through without pre-piercing holes.  The original bag had a rand on only one side seam.  I started with the simpler seam, stitching with buttonweight linen thread (not multi-ply cord this time) and re-waxing as I went with a blob of Victory Brown wax that I have on hand - it's softer than beeswax, so it's easier to use for this purpose.  The original pocket apparently had a single running stitch, so I knotted the thread at both ends of the seams.

The next step, sewing the bottom seam while inserting the rand on a curve, will probably be the most difficult.  I'll work on it today and probably tomorrow as well.

Painted suede is a conditional go

About a year and a half ago, Todd Feinman at RAT told me about a period leather finish that could be made from one part melted beeswax and two parts linseed oil.  The oil polymerizes so that the mixture isn't sticky when cured, and the beeswax keeps the mixture flexible.

Regular readers will recall that I've long been troubled by the question of how to reproduce the crenelated decorations frequently seen on Greek depictions of the gorytos.  You could stitch on dyed leather or cloth, but that always struck me as needlessly laborious, and very difficult unless the case's main seam were opened up, so I've concentrated on finding a paint that will do the trick.  It's my understanding that the gorytos and other such gear were made from soft, sueded leather cured with fat or oil, similar to braintan, so any paint would need to be water-resistant (as braintan-type leather soaks up water like a sponge and is hard to seal) and flexible so as not to flake off.  It recently occurred to me that the beeswax-oil sealer might make a good paint binder for that purpose.

I tried it out by mixing a little melted sealer and red ochre (I didn't take measurements, but the amount of ochre wasn't enough to thicken the binder significantly), and when it cooled, rubbing it into a scrap of buckskin, scraping off the excess, and rubbing what was left in again.  A few days later, when it felt dry, I cut the scrap in half and rubbed a top coat of unpigmented sealer onto one of the pieces.  I also tried "priming" another scrap with sealer before painting it and adding a top coat, and rubbing/scraping/rubbing plain red ochre oil paint onto a third piece, which was also then given a top coat.

Yesterday I put all four pieces into a sink full of water and let them soak for an hour and a half.  The result was impressive:  None of the paint on any of the four pieces ran, smeared, or softened in water.  They had apparently sealed in all the pigment in a good-as-waterproof manner.  I even scraped the paints with my fingernail and none came off.  The plain oil paint worked just as well when rubbed and scraped instead of merely brushed on, but it cured much stiffer than the beeswax-oil paint, so between the two, I think the beeswax is preferable.  The additional top coat was not needed, though I suspect it would make the paint job more durable in the long run.  Because German buckskin is so pale, only a little paint is needed.

This technique comes with a number of caveats:

1.  I know of no evidence whatsoever that the Persians or anybody else actually used a paint like this in antiquity.  The materials would've been available, but I have no reason to think that anyone combined them and used them in this manner, other than that it would've been a great way of making those crenelated bowcase decorations.

2.  I used hardware-store boiled linseed oil.  This version has some sort of chemical additives that cause it to cure faster than the kind that would've been available in our period, which (if used as a paint binder) would've been functionally equivalent to the purer linseed oil still sold in art stores for making traditional oil paint.  In other words, if you use the more period-correct oil, you'll need to allow much more time for it to "dry."  On the other hand, it's doubtlessly less toxic.

3.  Many leatherworkers believe that linseed oil's chemical properties degrade leather fibers over time.  However, I think the paint only soaks in shallowly, so I don't think it'll prove much of a problem.

4.  The rubbing and scraping technique is useful only for producing large, simple designs.  It may be possible to apply finer oil paint designs on leather that's been glued to a hard surface and primed with drying oil; if so, that technique might be appropriate for scabbard facings glued to a wood core.

Product review: Crazy Crow bag

Last year, RAT member Ivor (Crispianus) alerted me to the book Leatherwork from Elephantine (Aswan, Egypt):  Analysis and Catalogue of the Ancient Egyptian & Persian Leather Finds.  Among other useful information, you can see on page 102 (104 of the PDF) an Achaemenid-period bag in the form of a cylinder with a circular bottom and drawstring top.  While it may or may not be Persian, it at least gives solid evidence for a kind of purse or pocket that was carried during our time and within the borders of the empire.

A reenactor needs a small bag that can be kept on one's person for holding phones, money and other possessions that are best not left unattended around camp.  This bag is just about appropriate for that purpose.  It should be easy enough to make a replica should you have the time to do so, but similar bags already exist for the reenactment market.

One that caught my eye earlier this year is marketed by Crazy Crow Trading Post:  the large ball bag.  (British readers may pause to finish laughing before reading on.)  Its basic structure and even its size are similar to the Elephantine find:  6-1/2 by 4 inches (165 by 102mm) versus the Egyptian bag's 140 by 95mm.  The Egyptian bag is sewn with linen.  Its leather wasn't tested for tanning technique, but it has the color of and somewhat looks like smoked wet-scrape braintan.  The Crazy Crow bag is most likely made of a chrome-tanned cowhide split, dyed to resemble smoked braintan.  I have no idea what the stitching is made of.

There are some minor construction differences:  The Egyptian bag has two side seams where the Crazy Crow bag has only one, with thin folded rands on one side seam and around the bottom seam which the Crazy Crow one lacks entirely.  The Egyptian one also has a pattern of punched holes near the top, which could of course be added to a commercial bag after purchase if you have a small awl.

In person, the Crazy Crow bag is made of medium-weight suede, rich golden (a color that can be achieved by smoking undyed leather), with a much shaggier surface than would be produced by wet scraping.  The long drawstring is made of the same leather, which is thankfully not very stretchy.  Note that the catalogue description implies that these bags are made of various leathers - I expect they use whatever they have on hand that works - so the exact weight, color and texture will probably vary somewhat from one batch to the next while still fitting the general description of moccasin-weight cow suede.

As for practical use, I selected and borrowed some items that you might want to keep close to you at an event:  a 5-3/4 by 2-7/8 inch (147 by 73mm) smart phone, wallet, coin purse holding a few emergency medicines, roll of 10 bills and key ring with various mechanical and electronic keys.

The answer:  just about.  The drawstring almost entirely hides the top of the phone.  You would probably also be able to cram a passport in there.

Conclusion:  This isn't a top-of-the-line item, but it will certainly do if you're pressed for time to construct one that's a little more authentic. 

Cold-dyeing with madder root, part III and last

On July 3 I put the chamois in the dyebath with several rocks to keep it all underwater.  After just over a day, it was already showing heavy, but uneven, staining.

I took it out, swished it around and rearranged it every day for the next four days, toward the end of which it seemed not to be taking on any more color.  After that, fears that it may have eventually started to putrefy drove me to take it out.  The initial plan was to let it dry, rinse out any unfixed dye and bits of madder root, and put it back in the bath if the color wasn't satisfactory.

The chamois after drying but before rinsing.

I rinsed in about half a dozen laundry room sinkfuls of cold water without soap or detergent (per the advice of RAT members).  After several rinses, the color of the water began to redden less, but lots of leather fibers started slipping.

Both after the initial dyebath and after the rinsing, I pressed as much water as I could out of the leather, then draped it over a box fan on low to dry, kneading and rearranging it every half hour to keep it soft.

The finished chamois is noticeably lighter and duller than before rinsing, though not quite as bad as it looks here (it actually has a bit more yellow than you see).  Interestingly it seems that most of the slipped fibers during the rinse came from the shaggier side, which I take to be the flesh side.  It's now much smoother and more washed-out in color than the shorter-napped side pictured above.

So, success?  Well, for a given measure.  The leather is certainly red.  It's just not as rich or as even in color as we've come to expect.  For all I know, this could just be what madder-red leather looked like in ancient times, but maybe there are factors that would result in a better color, such as larger vats or more frequent stirring.

One last note:  The plastic bucket I used was also stained.  I wonder, if I use it for future dyeing projects with other colors, will they pick up some pink from this one?

Cold-dyeing leather with madder root, part II

After soaking the chamois in mordant solution for 24 hours, I drained it, pressed it, and spread it out to dry in the sun today.  It'll remain dry until the dyebath is ready to use.

I'm a little concerned about what the soak might have done to it, since the water had turned faintly chamois-colored.  Did the alum and/or the cream of tartar attack the aldehydes, liberating some of the fish oil?  I'll have to knead it once it's dry and see whether it's turned rawhide-ish.

Yesterday meanwhiles, I started getting the dyebath ready to use.  I'm using the recipe and numbers from Wild Colours.  Luckily I had a manygallon bucket on hand as well as a jar of calcium carbonate I bought for use as a white paint pigment last year.

Although the numbers call for using a 1:1 ratio of madder to fiber by weight, I used the entire 100 grams of madder for 71 grams of leather because I can't be bothered and what am I going to do with 29 grams of madder anyway?

I put the powder in the bucket, poured eight quarts of water over it, sprinkled on the calcium and stirred it all up with my hand in a rubber glove.  Then I covered it in Saran wrap and set it on the back porch, with another plastic bag tautly pulled over the top of the bucket to prevent rain from filling it up.  (In hindsight, another sheet of plastic wrap would probably work better for this purpose.)  It will sit for four days to a week and then the leather will soak in it for four days to a week.  So, next update in about two weeks.

Cold-dyeing leather with madder root, part I

I plan on an all-new akinakes and scabbard for Plataea 2021.  My previous designs have used acrylic paints on the leather scabbard or leather facing.  Since I'm hoping to eliminate as much non-period materials as possible this time around, and I never figured out how to make a water-resistant paint for leather, my current aim is just to use a dyed red leather facing and maybe a bronze applique.

The trouble with dyeing leather is that the equivalent processes for fabric usually involve simmering them in water with mordants and dyes, but simmering leather invariably causes it to shrink and harden.  To work around that, I'm attempting both the mordanting and dyeing processes "cold" (which is to say, not hot enough to cause the leather's collagen protein fibers to coil up, which is what causes shrinkage and hardening).

Cold-mordanting is not unheard-of, as Sea Green and Sapphire describes.  Heat merely speeds up the process, but if you leave the fiber to soak overnight, you really only need enough heat to dissolve the mordants.  For me, all this is theoretical, and Heidi is speaking of wool, not leather, so we'll see whether it holds true in my situation.  It's my understanding that mordants for wool will work on leather, since both are proteins.

I'm using aluminum sulfate, which providence caused me to buy a pound of back when Allegheny Art was still operating in my town.  I have most of that left.  Ancient Mesopotamian records often mention alum and madder in association with leather, so we know this is a period-appropriate method.  Cream of tartar is, of course, readily available in grocery stores, and people should have at least been familiar with it in the Achaemenid period, since it readily precipitates out of fermenting grape wine.  Admittedly I don't know whether it was used to assist in mordanting at that time, but I'm willing to admit it as a plausibility.

The chamois leather in this attempt is from the nearby Ace Hardware.  It's also sold at Pep Boys, Home Depot, and probably other large auto supply and hardware stores.  Chamois, as I've noted before, is a type of fat-cured leather; the only difference between it and braintan is that the fish oil in chamois generates its own aldehydes as it oxidizes, so it doesn't need smoking to introduce them.  Thus, the fat is already permanently bound to the collagen, so wet chamois can be allowed to dry without kneading and will be easy to re-soften.

After cutting off some snippets for last year's casein paint experiment, I was left with 2.5 ounces of chamois.  Using the ratios from Botanical Colors, I came up with measurements of 14 grams of alum (just under a tablespoon) and 4 grams of cream of tartar (just under a teaspoon).  I dissolved both in Pyrex cups of hot water.  Interestingly the cream of tartar didn't seem to want to fully dissolve; around an eighth of a teaspoon of powder coalesced at the bottom of the cup no matter how many times I swirled it.

I dumped it all in a sink with warm tap water, added the chamois and kneaded it until it was thoroughly wet.  Tomorrow it gets hung out to dry, and with any luck we'll have some good weather ahead for the next stage.

Testing casein paint on leather, part III

Dammit.

Our test board cured for an entire month.  Last week I added some thin layers of carnauba wax paste, which is, admittedly, not something that would've been available at the time (carnauba palms are native to Brazil), but I was attracted to the fact that it's harder than beeswax and has a higher melting point.  It's difficult to see, but on some of the swatches it dried to a whitish waxy appearance.  At this point, my favorite was the glue-soaked, sanded leather with a wax topcoat and no gesso (lower right corner), which was smooth and a bit glossy.

I wanted to first test the paint against rough surfaces and sharp implements to see if it would flake.  It didn't, though the knife and half brick scuffed the paint applied over unglued leather badly.  The glued/sanded/waxed/un-gessoed swatch looked to be the most durable, as both implements glided over it leaving superficial scratches.

The real test, of course, would be the rain.  I waited until today when it was convenient to set the board outside for an hour, as I figure these are realistic conditions.

In the meantime, I cut up a whole bunch of undyed, semi-bleached linen swatches, as I figure these would be the most likely to show paint smudges if someone's clothing were to come into contact with wet paint.  When the board came inside, I rubbed one swatch of linen against each swatch of paint.

At this point, it became difficult to read the labels, but that didn't matter.  NONE of the paint swatches adhered well enough for practical use; each one smudged badly onto the linen.

Sadly, the glue-soaked but un-gessoed swatches fared by far the worst, as the glue absorbed water and turned liquid.  The paint slid right off of them.  The gessoed ones didn't do much better.  The wax topcoats gave no noticeable protection.  In fact, the leather swatch with no treatment at all (corresponding to the linen at the bottom of the leftmost column) did best - or, at least, least worst - although as you can see, it still smudged.

So where do we go from here?
The thing is that milk paint is normally applied to raw wood, and it's said to be durable in this application, particularly if coated with a drying oil.  This leaves us with several options:
1)  Bare wood scabbards with only a drying oil or wax finish.
2)  Painted wood, again probably having a water-resistant finish.
3)  Unpainted leather facings, perhaps vat-dyed in a single color (I am told that a finish of beeswax and drying oil will prevent dye bleeding, but that's a question for another day).
4)  Embossed sheet metal facings, either over a leather facing or glued directly to the wood.
5)  Oil paint or encaustic (wax).  Unfortunately, I know of no evidence that these types were used in our period.

The first two leave us with the issue of the scabbard possibly splitting along the seams when the blade is pushed in or jostles inside the scabbard while the wearer is running.  Only the chape would provide reinforcement.  It's possible that small bands of organic material such as rawhide were tied or stitched around the scabbard farther up, leaving most of the wood bare for painting, but that's pure speculation.

Options 3 and 4 have good historical grounding, as the Issyk Golden Man's scabbard was covered largely with leather and small sheet gold adornments, while the Achaemenid scabbard from Egypt had a (now-vanished) gold facing pasted to the wood.  We're still left between a rock and a hard place:  Most reenactors won't have the skills, or money to pay someone who does have the skills, to make a full metal facing, since fitting one to the complex curves of a wooden core in the classic Achaemenid shape would require lots of careful hammering to expand the metal in certain areas.  On the other hand, leather alone is pretty dull-looking, and I've never seen evidence for Achaemenid scabbards with partial metal plates such as those at Issyk which would be easier to make.

I'll look into carrying out milk paint tests directly on wood.  In the meantime, Ivor at RAT brought to my attention the book Chariots in Ancient Egypt, which is said to have some evidence for painted leather.  Now I have a few more weeks of free time before the spring semester starts, I can finally start checking whether it contains anything potentially applicable to our situation.

Testing casein paint on leather, part II

Traditional gesso is sold as a powder, which is mixed with water in a 4:3 ratio, covered and allowed to soak for a day before warming it to melt the glue.  Warming produces a texture like melted ice cream.  The liquid is then painted on, allowed to dry, sanded, and painted on again.

After the first coat, I found that the remaining gesso cooled to a bubbly, rubbery texture that could be ground into the preceding layers, squishing it into a smooth paste in the process.  Both wet and dried gesso is a stark, eggshell white.

The next step was to mix and apply the powdered milk paint.  This is a sample of Real Milk Paint Co.'s "barn red," which has a slighly dull, ochre-like color (though if I use this type of paint on a large scale, I plan to use a colorless base and add storebought pigments so I know they're authentic).  I mixed it up in a common salad dressing-style cup with a lid and used another cup to measure out the water, as the recommended ratio of powder to water is simply 1:1.

Not long after the paint was applied, most of the gessoed swatches showed fine cracking.  Presumably the gesso absorbed water from the paint and swelled.  The swatches with glue but no gesso didn't seem to have this problem.

Interestingly, the swatches that were neither soaked in glue nor gessoed seemed to do very well, with no cracking even when I tried poking at them with my fingernail.  This may change over the following month if the curing paint becomes harder and more brittle.  The other factors are how well it handles water damage and whether the paint over chamois can be sufficiently sealed with wax if water becomes a problem:  a hard, non-sticky wax may also tend to flake off if the underlying leather is still puffy.

Background for testing casein paint on leather

Casein paint, or milk paint, is made by mixing milk protein (usually concentrated or coagulated) with pigment and often hydrated lime, which causes a chemical reaction that makes the dried paint harder and more durable.  Roman reenactors frequently use it to paint their scuta (large legionary shields) and report that it's fairly water-resistant, more so if a wax top coat is applied.  The basic ingredients should have been available in Achaemenid Persia, and the use of milk paint is documented from the Bronze Age, so I consider it a reasonable option for period-appropriate paint.

Could it have been used on tanned leather?  I'm planning to make some more akinakes scabbards - well, sort of; I'll have to farm the wooden cores out to a professional woodcarver this time because I no longer have access to the kind of tools that are needed to produce them in a reasonable timeframe.  Anyway, wooden scabbards are greatly strengthened with a facing or other reinforcements to keep them from splitting along the seams, but aside from the chape (when it was made as a separate piece), the only reinforcements known on akinakes scabbards are facings and the only facings known are leather and embossed sheet metal.  Shaping sheet metal around the expanded throat of an Achaemenid scabbard requires great skill, so I'm going to rule it out.  That leaves leather.  As I've said before, I believe the usual leathers used in the period were fat-cured (similar to braintan and chamois) or rawhide.

Chamois is cured with fish oil, just like buff leather and German buckskin.  In the U.S. it's made from sheepskin, although the term chamois in French refers to a species of goat.  As a result, chamois is thin, elastic and soft, so it should be easy to stretch over a scabbard.  Its non-abrasive properties make it popular for polishing cars, so it can be bought in automotive and hardware stores.  I bought a three-square-foot piece from Ace Hardware for $20; I think this should be sufficient for covering two scabbards.

Milk paint is generally said to need a ground (the surface onto which it's painted) that is both hard and porous.  It works very well on raw wood.  On vegetable-tanned leather it's sometimes reported to crack.  However, as far as I know, nobody's tried it on suede leather before, so I wonder if it might not be able to soak in like thin hide glue paint.

An alternate method might be to harden the leather by soaking it in hide glue.  However, I believe this would reduce its porosity.  There are two methods of prepping a non-porous surface for being painted with milk paint that I read of:  sanding the surface to roughen it and give the paint something to "bite" into, and priming it with gesso, which is a mix of glue and chalk dust.

RAT member Feinman informs me that soaking the leather with hide glue would make it hygroscopic (meaning it would tend to absorb atmospheric humidity), which could present problems for paint adhesion.  I know of no way of dealing with this.

The other factor is whether or not to apply wax.  Over bare suede, I think that wax would tend not to seal very well.

For the time being, I intend to test everything.  I've gotten a wooden plank and attached small swatches of chamois with hide glue, each of which will then have some milk paint applied.  There are nine swatches, the three largest of which will be shared by two test treatments, so as to try every combination of leather glued only by the back, soaked with glue, sanded or not, primed with gesso or not, and waxed or not.

(The nailed-down rawhide pieces in the middle were from another project.)  As you can see, the glue-soaked chamois is brown and almost transparent.  It dries hard enough that I can barely dent it with my thumbnail, although it's not as hard as rawhide.  Also, chamois that's glued on the back but not soaked and then allowed to dry can be soaked later by rubbing more glue on the front.  The glue seems to bond the chamois pretty strongly to the wood.

Over the next few days I'll have to narrow down the possible choices of gesso and wax.  Once all the paints are thoroughly cured (allow a month) and treated, I'll test the paint's adhesion when dry, adhesion when wet, and resistance to bleeding and smearing when wet.  Stay tuned!

German buckskin sale

Crazy Crow Trading Post (U.S.) currently has factory-second German buckskins on sale through the end of October.  According to the ad copy, "5-10% of some hides have uneven color or are thicker in the neck, and a few hides have 1-2 small holes."  It's still a pretty good deal:  A 14- to 16-square-foot hide is now 75.65USD, compared to $112 for the same size in first-quality.  This is the type of leather I recommend for clothing, shoe uppers, bags and gorytoi.

German tanning is a type of fat-curing, so these are among the most accurate materials for our purposes short of handmade braintan, as well as being the cheapest fat-cured hides of their size and weight commercially available today.  The difference between German tanning and other fat-curing methods is that the cod liver oil produces its own aldehydes, so the finished product doesn't need to be smoked to allow re-softening if it gets wet and dries stiff.  Some German buckskins are smoked to be a better substitute for braintan in Native American crafts, but the ones currently on sale are not.  This means they'll initially smell like just fish instead of like smoked fish, though I think the smell will fade with time.

Leather and shoes, further updates

I've been in a lengthy and very informative discussion about leathers over at RAT, and it seems that grained leather may be on the table again.  This is not inconsistent, since what I've read from brain-tanners is only that it's not easy to get the same softness from a hide without scraping the grain off; they never said it was impossible.  Member Ivor (Crispianus) brought to my attention two things I found surprising:  a modern repro of an Iron Age shoe, tanned with fish oil with the outer grain intact, and a detail from a piece of Hellenistic statuary showing a pair of Iranian shoes from the side.

It is a scan from Skulpter des Hellenismus.  It shows that the ankle shoe in this period was made not from a one-piece upper (a la the Plains moccasins and Hedeby shoes I'd been using as a model), but from a separate vamp and quarter.  This allows the quarter to rise as high or low as you like, whereas a one-piece upper has to have extensions sewn on if more than a certain height is desired.

(It further means that the Minnetonka moccasin boots are less inaccurate than I thought, and with a little modification, are actually the only off-the-shelf shoes I've seen that are anything like acceptable.  I managed to pull the heels off mine recently, but since they only appear to be available in soft sole now, you could just glue or tunnel-stitch your own leather/rawhide soles without having to potentially rip the bottoms up.)

For comparison, I went searching for high-res pictures of the Alexander Sarcophagus, which is one of the best sources for Persian clothing at the transition of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods.  In the restored-color versions by Vinzenze Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, the straps appear to encircle the ankle like those on Median shoes on the reliefs at Persepolis, but without the "branches" going down the sides.  However, there is an extreme closeup over at Wikipedia which appears to show a faint vertical ridge on the central figure's shoe.

With regards to the Persepolis reliefs, Ivor pointed out that the vertical branches could easily be interpreted as strips of reinforcement running down the front edges of the quarter.  The ankle strap itself - as he demonstrated by sewing an example - was probably just stitched to the top edge of the quarter rather than running through slits (as per moccasins).

The later example above is slightly modified, with the lace running through a single pair of eyelets, essentially making it a very simple chukka.  In this configuration, the eyelets are under much more stress than in the first, since they are pulled forward to hold the top around the ankle, whereas when running the thong around the ankle (either through slits or sewing it on) doesn't pull the shoe leather, but merely squeezes it against the ankle, like a drawstring.  Therefore, the later configuration would do well to have a reinforced eyelet.

Hide glue paint - the rain test!

Clockwise from bottom:  acrylic, hide glue with natural pigment, hide glue with natural pigment and food color, hide glue with pigment and alum, and hide glue with pigment, food color and alum.

 

After an hour's soak and a little rubbing.

 

Wow!  All the hide glue patterns washed out to the point of being barely noticeable, regardless of alum content.  Either I'm missing some information, or this is just to be expected - if historical paintwork was done in this way at all.

Hide glue paint tests - preliminary results

Achaemenid motifs on glove suede painted in acrylic (left), hide glue with added alum (top) and hide glue without added alum (bottom).

In the first batch (without alum), it took a water-glue-pigment ratio of about 5:3:2 to get the consistency I wanted.  I am just now realizing that I scaled the mixture down wrong and added twice as much alum to the second batch as I should have, which accounts for why it was somewhat thicker than the first batch (premature gelling - the alum content was probably around 3-4 percent instead of 1-2).

The thick consistency of the second batch - also probably caused by stirring up as much of the pigment as possible, as I noticed the first time that it tended to settle - meant that it didn't soak into the leather as readily, making for a blobby-looking design.  Since these test designs are very small, I think in more practical use it won't be much of a problem.  You can try different amounts of water and find what you prefer.

The acrylic paint is very slightly glossy, while the hide paint isn't, but I wouldn't say the acrylic looks too bad.  As for flexibility, the acrylic is far more flexible, but I think the hide paint has adhered well enough to the suede that it won't flake off.

Another issue is that the only pigment I had in the house was raw sienna, which when added to the glue, gave it a color almost identical to the leather itself - you can only see the faravahar on the top swatch because the painted areas reflect light differently.  This will make the last test hard to judge; I may try again with some food coloring added just to mark clearly where the paint is to begin with.  The last test is to soak the swatches and see whether the paints run; this will hopefully show us how our stuff will handle rain.  The acrylic paint manufacturer suggests "air-curing" it for one week before cleaning, so I'll be trying this out in a week and will probably report the results on Friday.

Hide glue paint tests - gearing up

Thesis
It is possible to paint soft-tanned leather goods using basically period materials.

Background
Animal glue is one of the oldest-known adhesives in the world, second only to plant resins.  Archaeological evidence dates back to the Neolithic, written references back to the Bronze Age.  It's made by cooking down animal tissues that are high in collagen, a connective protein; these tissues are typically bone, tendon, or particularly skin (strictly, hide glue is only that made from skin).  Today it's still widely used by woodworkers, especially those engaged in making and repairing stringed instruments.

Animal glue is also used as a paint sizing, the substance in which the pigments are dissolved and by which they adhere to the canvas.  Plains Indians used a thin solution of glue for painting buckskins.  It's supposed to soak partly into the hide, remaining semi-flexible - the rough, "open" finish on brain-tan probably helps with the absorption.  Since the most common leathers of the ancient Mediterranean were similar to brain-tan, this sounds like a plausible solution for us.

Standard "hot" hide glue must be held at around 140 degrees Fahrenheit while working:  colder and it will gel, much hotter and the collagen will begin to break down, weakening it.  However, hide glue can be kept liquid at room temperature by the addition of an anti-gelling agent, commonly salt or urea.  While I can't prove that it was used historically, urea was always readily at hand in the form of urine.  That may sound disgusting, but when you think about some of the things people had to do to make leather, adding pee to glue suddenly doesn't sound that farfetched.  Thankfully, we don't have to trouble ourselves with that, because premixed liquid hide glue is already available at some hardware stores.

While liquid hide glue has a lesser reputation than hot hide glue due to the urea weakening its bonding power, and unused portions will break down over time, Stephen Shepherd of Full Chisel has argued that fresh liquid hide glue is still one of the stronger glues available.  In any case I'm not sure whether the strength of the glue is as critical in painting as it would be in woodworking.

There is one other consideration:  While Greece is pretty dry in the summer, most of our stuff would have been exposed to rain sooner or later in ancient times.  Hide glue isn't waterproof by itself, but can be made highly water-resistant by the addition of a small amount of alum.  Again I have no reason to think this was done, but alum was used as a mordant and leather tannage, so it was at least available.  The containers and brushes used with glue that has alum added, must be washed thoroughly before the paint dries or it will be difficult or impossible to wash out afterward.

Materials and methods

Liquid hide glue
Water for diluting glue
Alum (aluminum sulfate)
Earth pigment
Suede leather scraps

Alum is recommended in amounts of 1-2 percent.  Too much can cause the glue to gel prematurely.  Assuming it has a similar weight to salt, for one ounce of glue (before dilution), I estimate one twentieth of a teaspoon would be the correct amount, but since it's so hard to measure in such quantities, I'll try it by eye - slightly less than half of an eighth of a teaspoon ought to be close.

In order to mix the alum thoroughly into the glue, it should probably be dissolved in the water first.  An exact ratio of water to glue is not given in the Crazy Crow instructional, so I'll begin with a 1:2 ratio which hopefully won't make it too dilute to begin with.  Let's start with a tablespoon of glue, a teaspoon and a half of water, and half of a half of an eighth of a teaspoon of alum.

The bottle on the left is a modern acrylic leather paint I have on hand, which I'll be comparing to the hide paint to see whether it's acceptable as a more convenient substitute.

Questions
Does hide paint remain flexible enough when dry for use on soft leather goods (gorytoi, bags, clothing)?
Does waterproofing with alum affect the paint's flexibility?
Does acrylic leather paint provide a similar appearance and degree of flexibility and water-resistance to alum-treated and alum-free hide paints when used on the same leather?

Will the retractions ever stop?

So, here's where I am with regards to leather now:

Most sources on fat-cured leather, mostly relating to Native American brain-tanning, indicate that the the grain side is normally scraped off before the fat is applied.  It does not have to be, and obviously cannot be in the case of furs, but doing so does allows the hide to absorb the fat much more readily.

The upshot is that contrary to my previous recommendations, prior to the introduction of veg-tan, the leather available to the Persians and other ancient West Asians most likely (or most likely usually) did NOT have a smooth finish.  Rather, it may have been lightly napped or sueded.

Just to be clear:  It is possible that smooth leathers were available or even common.  It's just that given my current understanding, it's unlikely that they were common.

Therefore, my recommendation is that you look for any of the following:
True brain-tanned - available mainly from small craftspeople.
German-tanned - deerskin cured with cod liver oil.
Double-sueded cowhide and splits - mostly chrome-tanned.  Look for those labeled "glove-tanned" for the softest texture.

If you have only "commercial" buckskin with a grain side or smooth glove leather on hand, you can just turn it inside-out as long as the flesh side has a fine nap.

The sources available on the Internet are endless, but off the top of my head, a few in the U.S. would include Crazy Crow Trading Post (German-tan, commercial deer and bison splits, and cowhide), Tandy Leather Factory (pigskin and cowhide splits - I don't know about the finish on their deerskins) and Braintan.com.  All these companies also sell rawhide.

Madder-dyed leather

To give you an example of what results a period leather dye might produce, a recent thread at RAT alerted me of several items Martin Moser made and dyed with genuine madder.

Vindolanda Calceus
Drawstring Bag

As you can see, it's a bit rusty rather than pure, deep red.  The leather is alum-tawed so presumably it would have been a light color to begin with.  Possibly leather that starts off brown, like a fat-cured hide that's been heavily smoked, will produce a somewhat deeper (albeit brownish) color.

A reprieve for painted leathers?

So, I'm now reading that Native Americans have been painting soft brain-tanned leathers since before the introduction of modern acrylic paints, by either rubbing dry pigment directly into the surface or by using a thin hide glue solution as the medium

Powder Paint:  Preparation & Application

The fact that I've often remarked on that brain-tanning is a subtype of fat-curing and that Old World curing techniques might (at least on paper) had produced similar results, reopens the possibility that similar decoration methods could be used on gorytoi and other leather accoutrements in the Achaemenid period.

Revised recommendations on leather goods

Based on my last post regarding the unlikelihood of vegetable-tanned leather in Achaemenid times, here is what I've come up with for leather goods:

Materials
Personally I would accept brain-tan or the nearest affordable equivalent as a substitute for other fat-cured leathers.  The nearest affordable equivalent may include chrome-tanned "buckskin" or glove-tanned if it's of similar physical properties, but, as always, check your group's authenticity standards before buying.  I advise against suede or roughout (which are harder to clean; additionally, I believe machine splits are a 19th-century development) and, obviously, anything with an overtly unnatural finish.

I consider rawhide a given for any period.  Also, if you already have pieces of kit in veg-tan that you've sunk a lot of money and work into, my feeling is keep them.  Again, ask your group's leaders.

Gorytoi
Archaeological finds have indicated that they were made of soft leather supported with a wood spine or frame.  So use fat-cured or equivalent.  I imagine the type seen at Persepolis and frequently on Greek pottery, with a straight bottom and curved upper edge - the standard for Persian soldiers in our period - had a curved wooden spine sewn into the upper edge.  This also means that the floppy-looking fringe seen hanging from gorytoi in Greek battle art may in fact be the same fitted cover seen at Persepolis; it is attached to the gorytos at the top edge, or just draped over it during battle.

Using soft leather also makes it unlikely that they were painted, unless the ancients had some method of painting dye directly onto the leather which I have been unable to discover (painting dye is a real technique but I'm told it's a modern one).  The crenellated borders shown in Greek art would probably have to be appliqued in a contrasting leather or fabric, which is done most easily before the main seam is closed.

Scabbards
Wood, or some other hard, solid block of material carved to shape (as in the ivory one from Takht-i Sangin).  The akinakes scabbard is attested as having been covered in embossed sheet metal.  Otherwise, plain wood will make a good surface for carving.  I could also imagine that a facing of glued fabric or parchment (thin rawhide) was used to add strength.  All these materials will accept paint better than cured/tanned leather, too.  Possibly, lighter sheaths (as for belt knives) were rawhide, maybe with a soft leather or fabric cover.

Shields
Shields of stick-and-hide construction, like the crescent ("taka") and pavise ("spara"), should almost certainly be rawhide, which resists puncture and cutting better than leather and which was used in the Dura-Europos shields that share the same construction method.  I have heard it suggested to paint a thin layer of wax on top of the finished shield to prevent water absorption.

Shoes
The Persepolis reliefs and Alexander Sarcophagus seem to disagree about the presence of separate soles on the ankle-strapped shoes.  It may be that both interpretations are correct:  Again, I am reminded of these shoes' resemblance to Plains moccasins, which were produced both with integral (soft) and separate soles.  Separate soles may have been soft leather or hard rawhide.  The lack of additional soles on the shoes at Persepolis may explain why it was desirable to have a band running under the middle of the shoe, for arch support.  In this use I'd be willing to accept veg-tanned leather for rawhide for expediency.

Ankle straps were fairly wide, and were likely soft leather thongs.  I believe the greater width compared to modern leather laces was necessary because the latter are made of a firmer material (albeit not "rawhide" as they are often labeled; real rawhide is too stiff for shoelaces).

Other
Herodotus mentions Persians as having leather clothing (I.72) and this is plausible if it is a very soft buckskin-like material, though I believe that the assertion that leather made up all or even the majority of their clothing in Cyrus' day is an exaggeration; they had, after all, been settled in old Elam for several centuries and raised plenty of sheep.  So I still recommend fabric first.  Bags and pockets may also be either fabric or soft leather.

In the absence of moldable leather, drink containers should either be soft (like wineskins) or ceramic.  Most of the clay canteens from Persepolis were flattened spheres with short necks, essentially like modern ones, even sometimes having cord ears (see OIP 69); those without ears could be carried in bags.  I'm open to the possibility of gourd or wooden canteens, but won't actually recommend them until seeing some evidence.

There is only one item which I haven't found a solution for yet:  the weapon belt.  Because it has to support the weight of a fully-loaded bowcase, it must be a firm material with little stretch, so fat-cured leather would seem a bad choice, but it also has to flex to be worn like a belt, so rawhide doesn't look like a great idea either.  In lieu of good evidence about what they were actually made of, I must continue to recommend veg-tan for this use alone.

Ancient leather: a retraction, and a revision

Many times on this blog I've talked about the excellence of vegetable-tanned leather for applications ranging from shoe soles and water bottles to scabbards and bowcases.

Unfortunately, my more recent investigations have led to more recent scholarship that calls into question the existence of vegetable-tanned leather during our period.  According to Carol van Driel-Murray ("Leatherwork and Skin Products"), the supposed references to "oak galls" in Mesopotamian literature probably instead refer to madder, meaning the processes described are not tanning but dyeing.  The earliest unambiguous references to vegetable-tanning are found in late Classical Greek literature, whereas "the usual method of dealing with skins in Antiquity" was fat-curing.

Fat-curing is a process whereby emulsified fats are added to a wet hide, which is then kneaded until dry.  Sound familiar?    Brain-tanning is a subtype, and although Classical fat-curing more often used oil or lard, the result was apparently similar; Todd Feinman has described it to me as "very soft like Chamois leather."  The process is attested in sources from Pharaonic Egyptian art to the Iliad.

Where does this leave us?  Well, without clear evidence of vegetable-tanning in the Achaemenid empire, the hide products available to us are very soft fat-cured, brain-tanned or imitation buckskin leathers, or rawhide.  Obviously this will require a revision of how we go about making a lot of kit.  In the next few weeks I'll go over some specific items and how they should probably be made.