Update on Vellum Making

I am happy to say that we only spent another 10 hours or so to finish two skins. Helpful hint: when they say that you are supposed to wait to scrape them until the hair slips easily, they mean to wait until it slips very easily! The second skin was much easier to work with!

Until we got them in the frames for drying, I didn't realize how big these skins were. We had square 7 foot frames, and we actually had to trim the skins down in order to get them to fit.

We made our frames out of 2x4s, but there are some difficulties with a simple frame. First of all, we found out that you really need to brace the frames, because the vellum is far heavier than you would imagine. Our frames started to fall apart after about a week, and we had to go back in and fix them.

The other problem with our frames was, we could not stretch our vellum tight enough. That is one of the most important steps of the entire process. You are suppossed to stretch it as tight as possible, let it dry for a few days, then wet it completely and tighten the cords even more. If you do this correctly, it pulls all the layers of vellum into alignment and makes it flexible, almost like paper.

To accomplish this, the professionally-made frames are lined with pegs for you to tie the vellum to. When you are ready, you can turn the pegs to pull any excess cord around them. With our frames, we tied the cords around the frame itself, and then tried to hand-tighten them when it was time. It did not really work very well.

Now, parchment is only supposed to be slightly thicker than paper. Ours was much thicker. Because it was so thick and we could not stretch it tight enough, our final product ended up much stiffer than it should have. However, we still learned quite a bit about making parchment. It was a truly fascinating project...if one actually has time to do it. I barely did, but we made it work anyway! I really have a lot more respect for the ancient scribes, now. I mean, I always knew that it was tough, but I never realized just how much work it actually was.

We are not quite finished yet. We still need to sand the parchment down, and we are going to learn how to illuminate texts on it. To me, that was the draw of this project in the first place. I did not realize that it was going to take a random turn to making parchment first, but now I'm kind of glad it did. It is a once in a lifetime experience because, a) it is expensive, and b) I would never do it again...but I am glad that I got a chance to do it once.