Waxing lyrical...

So Dad's keen to get into the act too, and will cover the religious aspect of the display, dressed as a Benedictine monk. Part of his kit will be a wax tablet and stylus, which will interest the Public and lead into the topic of writing and record-keeping.

I dug around and discovered that wax tablets in our period came in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours - okay, black or green - and decided to make a nice simple 2-piece rectangular one. I had some maple timber left over from a previous project (fortunate, because evidently they actually used maple, amongst other woods, to make tablets) and laid into it with a jigsaw, too late remembering that I had never, ever been able to cut along a straight line! Took the pieces over to Dad's and with the aid of a workbench, saw and cutting guide he turned all my 'interesting' angles in to 90 degree ones. Came home and disinterred my old chisels and gave them a bit of a touch up (okay, they were blunt as hell) on the grindstone and started with the hollowing-out process. The boards are about 18mm thick and I wanted to be able to put about 5-6mm of wax in them and have it about 3mm clear of the top (so they wouldn't stick together when closed), so I chiselled out all the wood to about halfway down, leaving a half-inch frame. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of woodchip mess that comes out of such a small space...

Having hollowed them out I sanded the boards and then fastened them together with a leather hinge - contemporary sources seem to show either a hinge or a cord fastening - then melted some beeswax on the stove and rubbed it into the wood (makes a nice finish), and particularly coated the bottom of the hollowed-out parts as one of the problems I have read about people frequently encountering is that of bubbles forming under the melted wax, and then one needs to scrape the wax out and do it all over again...

Then came the most tedious part of the operation - getting lamp-black to colour the wax (I think the green-coloured tablets found in some manuscript pictures are probably coloured with verdigris, and I figured getting lamp-black would be easier...). Lamp-black is basically pure carbon - the residue that a lamp or smokey candle leaves on a surface held above it for a while. In my case, I used an olive oil lamp (renown for smokiness) and a spoon, and the process basically involved holding the spoon over the flame until a fairly good layer of black soot had built up, whereupon I'd scrape it into a small container and then repeat the process.

In the end I had about a teaspoon and a half of fine, slightly greasy black powder which I carefully carried to the kitchen and dumped into the pot of beeswax on the stove. To stop the black wax from setting as soon as I poured it into the wooden frames, I put them under the grill for a couple of minutes to heat them up a little, gave the wax'n'soot mixture a final stir, hoped that I had the frames reasonably level, and poured the wax in. I had to adjust the level of the frames with a couple of kitchen knives but otherwise everything went fairly well... except I decided to hasten the cooling process by shoving it in the fridge when it had half set, thus cracking it; and had to stick it back under the grill to re-melt the surface and get rid of the cracks. Still, the whole project was a lot less fraught than I though it would be.

Now I just have to make a stylus and a small leather bag to keep the lot in.