Yesterday I was actually quite fascinated by the parchment that had the illuminated text - which refers to the pictures or fancy letters that the scribes used to write. My favorite was actually the gold leaf example of this, and I was wondering how the scribes managed to do this; I've handled a type of gold leaf before, and from the best of my knowledge, it is a very, very thin material; it is easily torn, and even holding it between your fingers can tear it if it sticks to the sweat or oil on your hands.
Therefore I decided to look up the completion of this process, which is called "gilding." I assume that putting gold on any surface is labelled similarly, considering it's the same process. Anyway, the act of gilding actually involves a surprising number of materials, which includes but is not limited to, gold leaf, scissors, tweezers, Glassine, sewing pins, a drinking straw, gum ammoniac, propyl alcohol, a burnisher, Q-tips, egg cups, gesso, scraps of fine silk... And the list goes on.
The effects, however, are stunning. So though the process takes a tremendous amount of time (I'm sure it took scribes longer, seeing as how our modern appliances and tools weren't available at the time) the results are beautiful. Something that also interested me yesterday was how paper was made. I was unaware that some paper actually used cotton fibers as its basis. However, the paper-making industry as a whole isn't necessarily new to me, because in sixth grade my class actually attempted to make some paper and ink during our Medieval studies. We made use of sifters, as is the general practice, but instead of using some plant product, as the paper makers do, we used... construction paper. I thought that we were cheating, making paper out of paper, but nevertheless I went with it. Our class ripped up the papers into tiny bits and put them into a huge bucket of water. Then, we took our sifters and gathered up the paper particles, moved the sifter around to evenly spread the paper, and then let it dry.
The effect was cute, and our paper looked similar to that shown above, mostly because we were too lazy to rip the paper up into small enough pieces to make smooth paper. The methods we saw yesterday, including the chopping, hacking, and overall destructive tendencies of that machine certainly looked to be more effective. Hopefully when we make paper as a class we'll be close to achieving the smooth paper like the movie displayed!
Good points Madeline thats awesome that you got to make paper in sixth grade! Don't you think that the little mistakes and mishaps that add a story to the paper though? I like to think that every little mistake adds a sense of the human spirit and character to the piece.
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