Olivia is a very close and very dear friend of mine. When I saw her name come across the polling, I was hoping to be tagged if she made it out the other side to make her scroll. Of course, I did end up getting the pleasure and honor of making her scroll which was, of course, a delight.
But! It was finals time and I knew the only way I would have time to make her scroll before the event was to see if someone would help by doing the words for me, so I tagged in on Drake Oranwood, a well known bard and creator of sonnets, to work on the words for an award for his teacher, Olivia.
The words he came up with read as thus (You can read more about how he came up with his scroll here):
"Those hours, by her patient work, did frame
The lovely frock where every eye doth dwell;
She’ll play the tyger, to advance our game
And, most unfair, she fairly doth excel;
For never-resting hands sew garments on—
Olivia Baker will adorn with care;
Her friends will frost, and layer’d well upon,
Beauty o'er-cometh bareness everywhere:
Then good Queen Bess’s distillation kept,
Immers’d below the salt in halls of feast,
Beauteous court recalled from where it slept
To life, no mere remembrance in the least:
She hath distill’d all this, and so ‘tis meet,
An Em’rald show; her substance well shines sweet.
Adorned at the thirty-seventh Wars of the Roses
On this 28th day of May, AS LII
By Baron Jean-Paul DuCasse and Baroness Lylie Penhill"
Along with the words, he researched proper spelling and letter formation based on the period and sent that along with the words. In the end, I chose a bastarda style script for the hand and for an illumination, I studied a variety of cadels before deciding on a cadel work that would showcase elegance and allow me to use some gold work as well as red lines in it. Most of my inspiration came from the Matriculation Register of the Rectorate of the University of Basel, Volume 1 (1460-1567).
The final result was this:
