This is this weeks pogey bait: It’s a ball of carpet fluff.  The stuff you get off of a newly cut wool carpet. No, I’m not kidding.  I’m really showing you carpet fluff. This is special carpet fluff though.  It is carpet fluff that is dyed with gold. Yep.  It turns out that if you dissolve gold into miniscule nano sized particles with strong acid it is an excellent dye. A group of scholars at Victoria University of Wellington are doing groundbreaking research on dyeing with gold. They can dye wool and silk – anything keratin based because the sulphur particles in keratin form a strong bond with the gold. In addition to being just flat out cool, dyeing stuff with gold has numerous practical benefits as well. It is environmentally friendly – the process uses nothing but wool, water, gold and a very small amount of acid.  At the end of the process the water has far less chemicals in it than the water coming out of your dishwasher. Wool dyed with gold is …

Have you noticed how many fabrics are named after locations? Some fabric names taken from places go back to Roman times, and we are still naming fabrics after the places where they are made today (Thai silk for example). I’d love to do a tour of the world, visiting all the cities and locales that have fabrics named after them. It would make a good documentary. Starting in Europe, I could go to: Paisley in Scotland, which produced so many boteh patterned shawls in the 19th century that the cities name became synonymous with paisley fabric. Paisley, Scotland. Looks pretty! The fabric is also pretty… Argyll in Western Scotland, the seat of Clan Campbell, whose traditional tartan pattern inspired the argyle pattern. Tweed, through a misreading of the Scottish spelling of twill (tweel) is named after the Tweed River on the Scottish/English border. And of course, this gives us an excuse to visit Harris and Donegal to see the tweeds named after each of those locations. Is all of Scotland this beautiful? Donegal tweed and …