I’m getting bleary eyed. It is 9:30 pm in another hotel (I think it is outside of Oxford – yes, the Oxford of colleges, British humor and the Ashmolian Museum, where I’ll be tomorrow) and I have just finished looking at the last of the photos from the day. And am about to have a beer

This is, as the sign on the bus says, an “Embroidery Casket Tour” of the finest kind. I have been working on these little buggers for the past three years, and now I am rummaging in the bowels of museums looking at every casket I can get my hands on, along with 38 other people, mostly women, who turn the caskets we make into objects of beauty and permanent significance.
This is research and discovery, thanks to Tricia Nguyen who is running the tour and is the person who lured me into this bit of arcane history. You can go back to one of my older entries to see the caskets themselves, but this is an overdose. I think we have seen 18 or 20 of them so far on this trip, in Edinburgh, Glasgow, other places in Scotland, York and outside Liverpool. Large ones, small ones, worn ones, ones with brilliant color, and ones made muddy and almost unrecognizable by exposure to the ultimate enemy – sunlight. Not all of them are well made, most look to be Scotch Pine (not from Scotland, but from Germany. By the time these were made, from 1625 to 1675, there were few scotch pines left in Scotland.) but they all represent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours working the embroidery which covers the caskets. I think the work Nick, Heather and I have done on the “casket project” is well worth all the effort. I’ll swing by these museums in a few hundred years and see how many of our caskets are on display.

-R.