Showing posts with label Stylus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stylus. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

...And a pouch to carry it in...

Having made the wax tablets and stylus, I needed to make a pouch to keep them together and relatively undamaged... As 'Brother George' is dressing up as a scrivener (Wikipedia is most succinct: "A scrivener (or scribe) was traditionally a person who could read and write. This usually indicated secretarial and administrative duties such as dictation and keeping business, judicial, and history records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities."), he'd need the gear to be portable, so something like the ubiquitous scrip, with a shoulder strap, like a pilgrim's bag...

Befitting a Benedictine costume, the scrip needed to be made of plain, undyed leather - what I had was some sheepskin that had gone through the chamois-ing process (fairly unsuccessfully, judging by its lack of absorbent qualities) but had kept the tell-tale yellowish colour and distinctive smell of leather tanned in fish oil...

It's stitched with linen thread and has a pocket on the front for the stylus to go into... Now 'Brother George' just has to dig up skills from 60-odd years ago and re-learn how to write on a wax tablet! In a twelfth century font! Then I'll have to create some quill pens and oak-gall ink...

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

The Stylus

Period styluses (stylii??) were made of bronze, bone, iron, brass, ivory - something that'd keep a good point and not be too bendy. Figured I'd make this one out of bone, as there was a chunk of bone left in my back yard by my daughter's dog which had aged enough to be carved up...


Cut a piece off with a hacksaw and shaped it using the bench grinder, then polished it using sandpaper and steel wool; all in all the whole thing took about half an hour to make (not nearly as hard or time consuming as I thought it would be!)

It seems to work, writing and erasing in the wax fairly well, but it's summer in Queensland and I think the wax is a bit soft - in the winter rubbing bits out will be considerably easier and less messy.