a soul-sucking scribal experience

So, there's this scroll. I started it a few days before Pennsic, picked a nice Hiberno-Celtic MS for my exemplar, and figured it would be relatively straightforward: The design had the text in the center between four borders made of knotwork, the top and bottom being a bit wider than the sides. I'm an old hand at the grid + dots method of Celtic knotwork, but while I've never been able to do curves or more free-form styles, I figured that the two borders I wanted to copy were simple enough that I could figure it out, either by copying free-hand or by drawing out a grid and mappping it out on a grid.

I did the lettering the first day, and started to get excited about the final piece, since the lettering turned out gorgeous. I first tried copying the first border by sight, and quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to do that well.

Then followed three or four evenings, before and after Pennsic, devoted to trying to figure out how to copy the border -- by sight, with a grid, using a new grid method I found online -- and failing utterly. It finally culminated on Wednesday (which turned out to be a miserably evening on the whole: I tried making brownies from scratch with cocoa for the first time; they took more than twice as long to bake as the recipe said they should, and they didn't turn out how I like them (though Joel thought they were fine. Then I had the scribal mishap, to be outlined further. Then I realized that there were about a dozen decisions from July that had slipped through the cracks and so instead of being nearly finished with July I was suddenly more like a week away from finishing. Oh, and I broke my ruler, and I'm not sure if I can get a ruler which has inches on one side and centimeters on the other here in Europe) with me giving up trying to copy those borders at all and instead go with a dot + grid one that I knew I could do, but I knew would not look as good. So I drew that out, inked it all out...and then it smeared. At that point, I was so frustrated, I just packed everything up and didn't even try to look at it to see if it was salvageable. I could've just scrapped it entirely and started over, but the scroll needed to be done by next weekend, and as I said earlier, the lettering turned out really nice and I would've hated to just throw it away.

Today was the first time I could stomach looking at it to see how badly it was smeared, and it turned out to be not too bad; since I'd only outlined the threads and hadn't inked them in yet, I was able to cover up most of the smear that way. So I finished that border and the other three today, and it's done, and it doesn't look bad, but it doesn't look nearly as good as I'd hoped.

Pictures to come after next weekend.

a much better scribal experience

Luckily, I can counter-act some of the soul-destruction of my previous scribal entry by finally posting pictures of a pair of AoAs that I am extremely proud of, mostly because the recipients, nebelwald and wortschmiedin are two the most lovely and deserving people I've had the honor of making scrolls for. I got the assignment in early July; I'd been offered a choice between an AoA for a man and one for a woman by the kingdom signet, and since I had a lovely blank done by racaire1 waiting to be calligraphed, I said I'd take the one for a woman. Then when I read who it was for, I had a pretty good idea who the AoA for a man was for, and wrote Trin back and begged her to let me have it if my guess was right (and it was).

I was so excited, I sat down and started work immediately. From start to finish, the pair took me between 8 and 9 hours:



Walter's is on the left, Elisande's on the right. I left the two together, rather than separating them into two individual pieces, because I figured it might be helpful to have them as one for framing purposes, and if not, then they can separate them.

Since they're a couple, I wanted to do two that looked like an obvious pair. They are modelled on fols. 74v and 75 of a Book of Hours from Thérouanne, ca. 1300, reproduced on p. 133 of Smeyers, Flemish Miniatures:



The original is 9x13cm; I tried to keep similar measurements. I had to omit some of the neater bits (like the jousting monkeys and the man with the sword) in order to have space for the signatures, and since I still haven't found exactly the right nib for doing gothic hands at this scale, I had to substitute a different hand. But I really like the way the birds turned out! My first time doing animate creatures in the borders.

As you can see from the dates, these were originally going to be given out a month earlier, but only Elisande was able to attend the event, and they wanted to give them out together, so they were just awarded yesterday. I'm happy that they were able to receive them as a pair, but am unhappy that it didn't happen at the originally planned event since I was at that one, but not at the event this weekend.

Looking at these two will make me happy for years to come, both because they turned out so well and because of whom they went to.