Progress on the Thomasteppich: May-July 2014

Like the previous progress report on the Thomasteppich embroidery project, I have made a photo for most of the days from May till July 2014 when Anne did something with her part of the Thomasteppich, and turned these into another small video.

A change of colour

While working on the Thomas Tapestry replica, Anne and Katinka discovered that it was a bit odd that the clothing of the kings (and Christ) was of a very plain colour. You can imagine that Christ had a more sobre colour, but for mundaine kings this is hard to believe. The pale beige colour that we had chosen also was very similar to the natural colour wool. They started to think of changing the beige to a more purple one.

 The colours of the King is very plain on the old tapestry, in the new one the purple colour has been photoshopped.

We then looked at the other extant tapestries if such a purple colour had existed, and to our surprise it was the Thomasteppich where a 'lilac' colour was mentioned. In fact, it showed 'beige (lilac?)', in other words they suspected that the 'beige' colour had in fact been a lilac that has discoulored during the centuries. This made Anne and Katinka decide to change to purple. We were not sure which colour to choose from Renaissance Dyeing, so we ordered both the Purple (0203) and the Burgundy (0205). They have just arrived, and it looks like the Burgundy is more colour stable, so this will be the replacement for the beige.

Left the Burgudy, right the Purple, with the Beige and Natural colours in the middle.

Problems and the sella curulis

 The sella curulis as is should look like when it is finished.  

The apple trees in the background are old races: a lemon apple and a notaris apple.

We have had some computer problems lately, which ended up in buying a new one and transferring all the data from one to another (and having less time for blogposts). Luckily no data was lost, but the data transfer was a bit difficult with the old computer crashing every 10 minutes. Anyway, these problems are now solved. Meanwhile, I also worked on the seating of the sella curulis. It will look great, but due to a miscalculation I have to redo the leather (it was too short). In this post you will see some images of how the medieval folding chair should look like when it is finished.

 

Front view of the sella curulis