Adding gesso

After all the writing I did in the past weeks, there are now several capitals that will need to be gilded, and we found some pages with gesso missing, so we'll be adding gesso to those pages.

Bertrik is making some sugar gesso with dissolved gum arabic as a base, adding about 1 part ground kandijsuiker (sugar cristals) to 3 parts gum arabic.

Illuminations for each year:

Introduction - map
1987 - court
1988 - a flood
1989 - Group portret 10 year celebration
1990 - Maypoledance
1991 - Two knights fighting
1992 - Group portret Drei Eichen
1993 -
1994 - beugelen
1995 - dancers
1996 - double wars (trebouchet)

Saturday Afternoon

After a trying morning I setlled down at the table with the kids. They are drawing with dip pens, using diluted paint from a mussel shell, and I wrote a bunch of red capitals for page 89-4, 93-2 and 93-3.

It turns out we already marked those pages as done, so I don't get the satisfaction of marking something off the list, but no matter, we're having a peaceful moment, which is worth a lot, and also, it's a lot of fun to see them enjoying themselves with this stuff.

Next I want to try and finish the text for 1988, 1990 and 1992, all of which are mostly gilded. Page 1993 - 4 should be gilded before I write that page.

In between cooking a wonderful salad ("Sinterklaassalade"  van Keet Smakelijk) and miserable pancakes I managed to fix the text for 1988, 1990 and the introduction. Yay! Got to cross off some stuff from the list after all...

Next time we get together to work on the book we should look at the extra text I made for 1991, and some of the stuff on the discussion page to see if/where we can fit that in.