Nearly done

The piece using felt, based on medieval manuscripts, turned out quite differently from what I'd started to imagine.The first step was to "rule the page" - putting in guide lines in machine stitching, 1" apart. Then I cut some small bits of felt - thinking about lettering on the page - and moved them around, but nothing happened... Eventually, instead of using little bits of the colours from the "front" of the piece of felt, I ended up using the dark backside and adding colours, rather like an illuminator would have a base colour and then add different colours of decorative inks. Those areas still look too dark to me, and will get more stitchery.

The "page" was the wrong shape so I treated it like a fragment of a page. Often you find the pictures cut out of manuscripts (or recent books) and treated as objects in their own right. Which disturbs me - cut up a book? sacrilege! - and might be a reason I'm uneasy with this piece.

The lettering uses shapes that are easy to embroider - the last picture in the previous post, the page from the Luttrell Psalter shows that I've misremembered the lettering. Or else, cunningly simplified it.... Anyway, the "words" are actually nonsense, and there are a few nonsense letter-forms in there too. This brings back memories of a palaeography course, many years ago, learning about the history of writing, and also of various calligraphy courses, learning how to use some of the different scripts.

Not sure whether to run letters across the felt on the right, or to leave it as is - at the moment it reminds me of a much-scraped page of vellum, ready for re-use; the word incunabula comes to mind, but wrongly - those are the earliest printed books. The word I'm looking for is palimpsest, a manuscript that has another text written over it. In fact the layers of felt evoke that - quite apart from being made from the "hair" that has to be removed from the sheepskin that becomes vellum. Enough, already.