chris recently finished this pedestal for a niche in a new york home .. it will hold, i believe, an antique vase, or some other objet dart ... ive always liked that phrase; almost anything can be one, and you get to decide what is one, and what isnt one. all you need is a pedestal .. weve made a couple of these, and like a lot of other things, they look easy when they are done. click the photos to enlarge them.
this one will get a swedish style decorative painted finish by a local paint artist. it is currently displaying trevors masking tape ball, which he has been working on for several years. we use a lot of masking tape to secure edge inlays and other design details, (see this recent post), and trevor is careful and resourceful when he peels it. mark, who left our shop in 2007, after a 7 year stint, had a ball larger than a soccer ball, and just a little smaller than a basketball, when he left .. the tape balls are very cool objets.
a couple in process photos below ..
we made the cad drawing from the image below, using the dimensions provided by the designer ..
we used a combination of 3/4 baltic birch for the shaft, base and top, and solid woods for the moldings ...
The tapestry is made in the so-called Klosterstich (cloisterstich, see Racaires blog for a detailed pdf handout on this technique) embroidered in wool on rough linen. The klosterstich is a very economical embroidery technique: most of the woollen threads are at the front and only a small amount is at the back of the linen. The wool itself is a S-turned thread twined of two two z-turned threads. The embroidered wool completely covers the linen (unlike the Bayeux tapestry). The linen background consists of several bands which were stiched together, when the embroidery of these bands was finished. In the tapestry museum in Wienhausen this stitching can be seen on some other tapestry fragments, were parts of the embroidery have gone.
More than one nun worked on the embroidery, though it is not known who worked on the Thomasteppich. On some tapestries individual styles can be distinguished, proving that more nuns worked on a piece. Tapestries took several years to embroider, but also the preparatory work took a year.
