(no subject)

OY, long day. Lettering a Torah. There were a lot of small holes I hadn't seen when I was doing the estimate, so I spent rather a long time patching them. They were the annoying kind, when a hole breaks through a letter in such a way as to destroy the letter. You have to cut the whole word out, patch, and rewrite on the patch.

It was also exceedingly dry & flaky in parts, which basically meant re-writing the entire letter. It's not as slow as actually writing, because you don't have to think at all or do much delicate work, but it's pretty slow nonetheless. I only got through about half of Vayikra and somewhat less than half of Shemot, and the other half of Shemot looks to be in really hideous condition, whole columns and columns with basically no letters left. Bereshit wasn't much better, as I recall. And the boss won't hear of using non-quill pens, which is fine for writing, writing is ever so much nicer with a quill, but when fixing, you want a pen that a) writes small b) doesn't blob c) holds ink usably for the long periods when you're just scanning the page. Using a quill is sub-optimal in each of these, and takes so much longer.

It's hard work. You have to concentrate ever so much, and it's not really possible to position the scroll such that you can sit comfortably. Tired.