Cloth O'Gold.

As I was driving along beautiful Sunset Blvd here yesterday on my way home from work, my mind of course started thinking about the sample warp on the loom waiting at home, and pondering which weft threads to try out - that's the fun thing about sample warps!  It occurred to me that I had that tiny spool of real gold thread from John Marshall - and except for the little bit I gave Tien to weave into her inaugural warp on her new-to-her AVL, I had not used any yet.

It took me a while to wind the silk onto a paper quill.  I used my slender damask shuttle rather than any of my tensioned end-feed shuttles, since any of the tensioning systems on the shuttles might abrade the fragile gold thread.  I'm not in the habit of using untensioned shuttles anymore - once I used Jim Ahren's shuttle from Rosemary, and my own Bluster Bay shuttles (especially the one with the Honex tensioner in it) I never looked back.  However, my Swedish-made damask shuttle was excellent for this project since the threads can unwind freely as the quill rotates.  So I picked a quill that would work for that shuttle and very, very carefully wound off a small amount of the flat gold thread onto the quill, taking great care to not add any twist to the flat thread.

I opened a shed and began to weave some green silk weft, and after weaving about an inch of that, gingerly started weaving with the gold.  I was pretty cautious to not twist it (it's incredibly easy to add twist - even without trying - to any string or cord, just by winding it or unwinding it) and beat very softly, just enough so that the gold threads were snugly in the shed but not twisted or squished at all.  To my delight and astonishment, it turned out to be much easier than I expected to keep the thread flat in the shed.

It took me about an hour to weave just two inches of the golden weft into the red silk warp, until finally the little quill in the damask shuttle gave up the last of its treasure.  This textile was woven at only about 50 picks per inch, which ordinarily would take me about two minutes to weave, but since each golden weft had to be so gently and carefully beaten in, I went quite slowly.

I didn't dare wet-finish it once this little sample came off the loom; the substrate of the double-sided flat gold thread is paper.  I did steam iron it, but very gently. 

The results are staggeringly rich to see; the splendid real gold is a great counterpoint to the madder-red silk warp threads.  It is not sturdy; I think that if I wanted to weave a more stable textile with gold thread woven in, I would use it as a supplementary weft in a structure in which the ground fabric had its own warp and weft.  It would work very well, for example, in double weave, or in lampas weave, such as the legendary golden lampas woven for the Mongol court in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  Now that I have a 16-shaft loom, I can easily weave a fabric with two interlacing sets of warp/weft.

No washing of the cloth of gold, though; the only way to keep it clean is to never let it get dirty.  The amazing robes made of gold lampas and worn at the Mongol court were distributed to the nobles as tribute, and the penalty for washing one of the robes - because it would remove a great deal of the gold, all of which belonged to the Khan - was death! 

Once the golden cloth sample was finished, I sat in a pool of light from the setting sun by the living room windows looking at the cloth, turning it over and over in my hand and taking some photos of it.   I had gotten gold thread with a medium lustre only, not wanting it to be too shiny.  It is definitely shiny, but softly so.  And flat thread does not look the same as thread with a rounded cross-section.

The Japanese writer Jun'ichiro Tanizaki once wrote, in his  In Praise of Shadows that cloth of gold, and gold-adorned lacquerware, in Japan, were always meant to be seen in subdued light, such as that given off by a candle inside a paper lantern. Otherwise, he said, it would simply be too gaudy. Better to see it in half-light or in shadow.