Art

I spent a chunk of today working on the sunroom, and another chunk trying to write an application for a job in my hobby. That led me down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to find copies of documents that had been damaged on my old computer; now I am on a campaign to clean up all those CDs and get them out of the house. The application process reminded me of lots of arts and research things I had done in the past and completely forgotten about. It was an incentive to sit down and finish a little project I have been working on for a while.

Some months ago, I started a course on medieval manuscripts. It was really interesting, but the best part was the hands-on project of making a small book. This was hugely intimidating. I found an amusing text (a friend had bodged together an oath made by senior artisans to uphold the arts in my medieval hobby group with hand-washing instructions. Apparently, it takes just over 20 seconds to recite the oath, so it is perfect). I wrote out the text in an uncial script, did a fancy capital letter to start it, made a carpet page, did an illustration of handwashing, and even included a few errors (started to make the wrong letter in one spot and had to scrape it off to correct it, a few little ink blobs and some uneven lines, and even a forgotten letter that had to be squeezed in below the word). I’m pretty pleased with the result. Tomorrow I’ll stitch the book together. Here is the carpet page, copied from a Carolingian manuscript.