First, I pulled out the tracing template for the border around the text block. Parchment/ vellum apparently does not believe in parallel lines because it didn't matter how many times I lined up the template on my light board, nor how many times I adjusted the vellum, some part of the tracing came out not quite lined up. Argh. I've been reassured this is period, but it's still annoying.
This is the last picture you'll see of just the vellum with pencil marks on it. It's time for ink!
Callig, taking my time, runs about an hour or so most of the time. Maybe an hour and a half. The ink behaved, the vellum liked to buckle in response to the moisture, all pretty typical.
For people who have asked, I prefer Mitchell nibs and a pretty typical pen holder. I used Ian the Green's iron gall ink, which he makes from a medieval recipe and which only gets darker the longer you keep it. I can't wait to use up this first bottle and get into the second one I own.
My ink well is a souvenir from the Jamestown, Virginia glass works, a replica of the first industry that the Jamestown colony tried to establish. It's actually supposed to be a single dose medicine bottle, but just look at it:
It's a little thing, unnecessary in my kit if you want to be technical -- any heavy enough, open-mouth vessel would do -- but it feels just that little bit more medieval to use this one.
Here is the vellum with the words on it!
Since this piece isn't in English, I made a point of going back and proofreading it for errors, and it was a good thing I did. Apart from a couple of missing accent marks, there was a spelling error I needed to fix. "Agum" is supposed to be "agam" here:
How to fix errors: do not try to remove the error and then correct the spelling! If you're working on paper, you'll ruin it and your attempt to correct the lettering will bleed everywhere. If you look above, you can see that I put the correct letter over the error, "a" over "u". Let the ink dry, and only then do you take a knife and scrape away the bits you don't want:
The letter is a little oddly shaped, but much less noticeable than a black blob would be, or a fuzzy section of paper.
On vellum, once you've scraped the error away, you're pretty much done. On paper, you can take the extra step of burnishing the paper to smooth it back out and lay the fibers back down, so the error doesn't catch the light.
One more shot, this time so you can see the knife blade I used:
The handle is just a standard Exacto knife. Exacto makes scalpel blade refills that you can get in most craft stores. They are a better shape for scraping errors like this, cutting quills into pens, and other period activities. The famous triangular blade is still acceptable! But the scalpel blades work better if you can get them.
And that's it for today! Tomorrow I work up the courage to start laying in my gilding base... because there's going to be a lot of gilding on this piece.
Feel free to ask questions or leave a comment! I'd love to hear from you.
Total hours so far... I think roughly twenty. I am terrible at keeping track of my time, but this piece is going to get a lot of hours invested in it.
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