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Today’s parchment: a bit smooth and slippy, so I want to treat it with gum sanderac before writing. It’s a resin that you grind finely and rub into the parchment.
Grinding gum sandarac in a cereal bowl with a spoon is annoying, because so much of the gum sandarac sticks to the surface of the bowl that you end up with not very much left for yourself. It’s also not great for the bowl or the spoon.
So I have finally got around to buying a small lab-type pestle and mortar on ebay. It is rather amusing how I can get ALL THE SUPPLIES on eBay except for parchment and ink.
In a spirit of procrastination, I searched for “gallnuts” on ebay, to see if one could at least get the ingredients for ink. It altered the search to “walnuts,” which is not quite the same thing. “Gall nuts” it changed to “gill nets” (something to do with basketball).
“Oak galls” actually scored a result: OAK GALL INK 100% HAND MADE ECWS* WICCA. The description says it “darkens to a lovely, rich black/brown colour,” which doesn’t sound too good for us, since we can’t use brown ink.
The “Wicca” bit is viscerally more disturbing, although actually ink doesn’t HAVE to be made for the specific purpose of holy scrolls, and you CAN technically use idolatrous wine in it, so you COULD use Wicca-specific ink…but it looks like “Wicca” is just there to boost his search results, seems the maker is a historical re-enactment nerd.
No raw oak galls though, at least not today. I’ll do you a post sometime soon about how oak galls work in ink; it’s extremely interesting.
* English Civil War Society, apparently.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.