Wednesday 20 December 2017

VPC2017: Mistress katherine's Dog Collar, Puppet Theatre Towers & Bookmarks

The increasingly prolific Mistress katherine adds the following to her Challenge entry hoard.

Firstly, a medieval dog collar for the category Togs Togs Undies! 


This is a dog collar, based on the comments by Gaston Phoebus in 15C Book of the Hunt, and from illuminated manuscripts. Common features: red velvet, embroidery with gold thread or wire, a leashing ring, single eyelet, rumbler bells, studs of various kinds. Modelled by Mercalli ("what a good dog!"). Here's a good site with lots of doggy and hunt info.
And a good image from Gaston Phoebus of white pointy-eared dogs with collars.
Mistress katherine says: 
I was particularly delighted to read that the Boke of St Albans describes the kind of dogs to be found in a medieval Scottish town including a 'prick-eared cur'


The next entry is new towers for the puppet theatre at Canterbury Faire, made from scavenged cedar shingles and painted up like 14-15C examples. These are for the category Out Of Your Comfort Zone, which katherine assures us she was.

She says: 
This took me out of my comfort zone -- I had to use power tools and -- worse-- ask an unknown neighbour for permission to raid his construction skip. I also looked at the shingles after I'd painted them and realised that circular saw marks were clearly visible, which Master Edward confirmed was a no-no to proper woodworker eyes, so I flipped them over and sanded them down to start again.


Some examples of puppet theatres in manuscripts can be found at the Bodleian here and another example here.


Finally (at least for now!) - bookmarks in baronial colours for the largesse chest. From the 12C onwards, cords, threads of strips of leather were attached to beads, buttons and similar shapes to make stand-alone bookmarks. Multi-threaded bookmarks were particularly popular amongst the clergy for flipping back and forth in service books. These are for the category Fly The Colours, but they also meet the requirements for Give What You Get. More information about these from katherine here.







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