The Parchment Page
|
From Rabbit to Scroll
I. Parchment Making |
|
From the beginning:
I raise rabbits of the Marburger Feh breed. This is what they look like:
The heralds call this pattern the Vair. The belly of the squirrel is white, the top is smoky gray, so depending on how you combinded the furs you could get different patterns. Some day ... I will have my fur lined cloak, I'm working on it. You can use only the winter furs for tanning, the summer furs are thinner and not worth it. So I was looking for alternate uses of the skin for those rabbits butchered during the summer.
|
I am a scribe and love working with the medieval materials and tools. So the obvious thing for me was use those rabbit skins for parchment. Some 'recipes' for parchment making have survived, e. g.:
| How parchment has to be prepared Place (the skin) in lime water and leave it there for three days. Then extend it on a frame and scrape it on both sides with a sharp knife and leave it to dry. Prepare as much as you wish to roll around the cylinder and paint (the roll) with your colours. The Lucca manuscript, Codex 490,
| 
|
Middle of June I was ready to start. It had taken me a while to find the
kind of chalk I needed for the lime. Rick Cavasini, who makes a living from
hand-made parchment, had been so kind as to help with the 'recipe' for the lime solution,
as non of the manuscripts or treatise are that detailed. Rick's advise was: 1 1/2 -
2 cups of lime for 5 gallons of water. I kept 'records' of the process by way of emails to friends. I was
telling them about the various steps, with all the discoveries, successes and failures in
the process. By now I have some pictures to include as well, so here it goes: June 15, 2000 "I just needed to share the excitement, I’ll spare you the gory
details, but I have started on my first piece of rabbit parchment. The skin is in the lye
now, and although the chalk doesn’t really dissolve at all, it seemed to be working.
The inside started to look yucky after about one hour, I don’t think it would look
that way if it was immersed in water. Somehow I expected the lye to be something terribly
aggressive and was really careful about not touching the chalk, but then the parchment
makers were handling soaked skins with their bare hands all day long. It all makes sense. Guys, cleaning that skin is going to be sooooo messy! Scraping of the hairs and
the ‘leftovers’ on the inside - it already looks slimy now. At least it
doesn’t stink (not yet!?). .... I’ll keep you posted on the (messy) progress!" This is No. 6 -
before. June 19, 2000 June 20, 2000 The skin is stretched out in the frame and drying. Helmut built
the frame from scrap wood at home. It’s not pretty, but functional, and turned out to
be of a perfect size. He drilled many more holes into it than necessary, and that works
fine because I can change the pegs (and thus the angles) as I want. I’m using small
wooden pegs ("Dübel") usually used for joining wooden pieces. Scraping
it clean (almost) took a while. As I don't have a "lunellarium"
(yet), I was using my skinning knife and a rotary cutter for the scraping. I had to be
very careful with the knife so I didn't cut holes with the tip, but it worked ok. So
did the rotary cutter, which I liked even more for the sharp edge, but it is just not
meant for this kind of wet abuse. I have found somebody who will be able to make me
a lunellarium - I'm looking forward to that. The skin had still some fat and other tissue left. I was
able to scrape almost all of it off the skin. At some points I was tearing off layers of
‘skin’/tissue with my fingers. There’s still residual tissue around the
edges where it was harder to scrape, but those will not be used anyway. So the flesh side
was pretty clean, the hair side didn’t have anything to scrape off. It was just water
I was getting out of the skin this way. I don’t know how much scraping has to be done while
the skin is still wet, and I stopped at that point. One of my books (Scribes &
Illuminators, British Museum, or the tall white one - I’ll check this when I write up
‘real’ documentation) called for "vigorous scraping" to get the
parchment thin, but I cannot see myself doing this with a rabbit skin. Seems pretty thin
to me already. I almost scraped through the skin in one spot, it hasn’t broken yet
though. July 6 The parchment looked fine last night. It was almost totally dry already after
one day only. I did do some scraping on the dry stuff, but I’ll try to avoid that
next time and do the scraping while the skin is still wet. Rabbit parchment is very thin
already, and I started to tear half the thickness away in pieces, like you can sometimes
do with paper. The flesh side could use some scraping, it looked slightly cleaner, but you
have to be careful not to leave ridges. The strings had held pretty taut. I finished the
inside with sandpaper to get rid of some of the flakiness in a few areas – scraping
while wet will be much better! The grain side looks darker than the flesh side and didn’t need any
further treatment. I just took the knife to it a little bit to get a few rough spots (like
rough skin on your hand, that’s what it looked like) out, that was it. Then I put it
back to dry a little bit more. July 7 It's finished, it's real parchment. It works! I took it out of the frame. The spots where I had put
the stones in the skin for stretching had to be cut off. Now I have this nice piece
of parchment that will yield almost two pieces of 'standard' size paper (A4 for
Europeans). The sanding of the flesh side made that side very 'velvety', I'll try to
avoid this next time. August 9: It's probably a peculiarity of rabbit that the skin has dark spots where the animal isn't finished with the hairing process yet. If it's really bad I'll just dye the parchment black. But this way I end up with more black pieces of parchment than white (or purple, snif).
More to follow soon
The skin was cleaned somewhat, and then went into the lye.
The fat of these rabbits is yellow, and after a day you could see that in the lye, too.
That's what it looked like after a
couple days.
"The hair starts to come out when I stir the mess, so I guess the scraping day is
approaching. From some pulling it looks like the hair will come out easier than the
leftovers on the inside."
This is the skin draped over two sticks. In the
lower right corner you can see where I tried pulling the hair off.
"Tonight I decided that the skin was good enough for scraping, part I. The hair
started to come out when I stirred the skin in the lye. One of Helmut's dish (tree) stumps
was recruited as scraping aid, covered with some cloth, and I happened to find a blunt
kitchen tool for the 'original' scraping. I ended up getting the skinning knife out, too,
to cut away some excess stuff and do a final scraping."
"The hair came out really easy, the few that
resisted (looked like shorter new growth in a few spots about the size of a pin head)
could be scraped away with the blunt knife. The inside is more of a challenge, some tissue
hasn't come off yet. And I managed to scrape a few spots very thin, and cut the skin in at
least one tiny spot. I just realized that. The yellowish-greenish tint of the lye came
probably from the yellow fat. I'll have to observe this batch of lye.
Now the skin is in the lye for a second thorough soaking. I hope to be able to get more of
the tissue off afterwards. If not, it might take some sanding once the skin is dry. It
looks like it will yield a nice A4 size piece. The rabbit was almost totally through the
hairing and the skin is white except for a few spots and the 'fringes' (like belly). It's
soft and stretchy.
I like the idea that this skin is going to be parchment soon. "
"Next step is building the frame
for drying. It needs to be big enough, which I can determine now that I have an idea how
big the skin will be. I also need to make holes and little pegs to keep the skin taut in
the frame during the drying process, and I have to go find little stones."
July 1, 2000
The skin was soaking in clean water for 4 days. Two should have been enough, but I
didn’t get around to it earlier. Putting little stones under the skin where you
attach the strings to pull it taut works great! Without them it would be a pain. It’s
a small skin so I needed small stones. I found myself looking in the garden for smaller
stones after the first few.
The frame had many more holes than I needed, which was really handy. I found myself
moving a peg occasionally to change the angle when I put in more pegs. Getting it
spread out and taught was no problem, the pegs seem to hold.
It worked out really nice - it looks like a piece of parchment in the manuscripts!
July 4, 2000
This is the skin spread taught in the
frame - there will be a better picture forthcoming, I almost ruined the film.
The color is off white except for the unfinished hairing spots and it is really thin, like
100g/m² paper. It feels wonderful.
The next pieces of parchment are already
finished, one of them I dyed black. You can see the scroll I made from it on the 'Black Manuscript Pages' page. A purple parchment is planned, too, but I need a white skin for that.
