Votive stone #2? Work in Progress

 Following on from the abortive attempt at carving the spear-maid/Gerthild design in wood earlier this week, I decided to try it on one of the smaller slabs of sandstone instead. About an hour or so later, I had a rough, usable outline to follow and chisel out deeper:

The main problem was getting the image transferred onto the stone. For the first effort, black carbon paper did the trick - but not here. I had to redraw from scratch the loose design, in a 4H pencil, then carefully gouge the line with a small sharpened bradawl. No actual chiselling involved as the lines are too fine and fragile. This will be a problem for the more complex designs, such as the double portrait of Hretha and Maegtha, so I'll need to plan well in advance. The relentless gouging work, whilst saving my joints from impact, will cause a different range of pains and issues to my working hand so I need to limit my time spent on this over the coming weekend. As well as, I assume, consider how much of this kind of thing I can feasibly fit into the 6-7 weeks of actual work time remaining. But things are starting to move on and I got some good writing work done last night too - filling in some details in the final battle scene and its aftermath, tying up loose ends, and figuring out the joining scenes I still need to write to get the characters into that situation (several major scenes have been written out of sequence and there are many fragments floating about in LibreOffice). I reckon I need to have the poetic text pretty much finished by the start of July to allow time for the printers to do what needs to be done - the pressure starts here...