To finish off the carving, Helen and Sam at Grays Court came up with the idea of some text from the play on the rear of the tree, facing the castle walls. The line chosen was “What wakes me from my flow’ry bed”, which was suitably succinct as I was really limited for space on the rear ~ and some of the wood around the area didn’t look too clever.
I’d started off by having very rigid and symmetrical capitals, my thinking being that it would make the best use of the space; when I came to use this style though, it just didn’t look right ~ too formal and structured. Also, I would’ve had to wrap the letters around the branch quite a bit which would have made reading the text difficult from the walls. After much deliberation, I went for a hand-written look, with a lot freer layout and less planned.
Drawing on the letters and chiselling away.
The text carved on. A bit more oil and dust in the letters and they should stand out more.
Two more coats of oil on this area and the entire carving’s finished!