Another month, another Crocodile Mystery. What might this be?
As always, please use the Comments section for wild guesses, brilliant insights, etc.
“What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?”: March 2014
13 Comments
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Another month, another Crocodile Mystery. What might this be?
As always, please use the Comments section for wild guesses, brilliant insights, etc.
13 Comments
I’ve heard of books and papers being used to pass coded messages made from pinpricks in the paper.
I think it’s sand covered mussels.
I see tiny stiches of a black thread, at the back of an embroidered book cover.
my guess is most certainly erroneous, ‘mais quand même’ …
It looks like some sort of device using punctures along a line to allow powder or ink to pass through and transfer the outline of a drawing to another surface.
Tom Reedy’s answer is verrrrry close….
I think it’s parchment that’s been eaten by the parchment mites that gave Niles Crane his allergy.
I don’t know how “verrrrry close” to a stencil it is, but it reminds me of some old lampshades I’ve seen.
Tom’s idea was my first thought too, except that I can’t see a cartoon/outline image that is being transferred and the pricks are obviously coming from the side we’re looking at. Hmmm… Is it maybe a piece of lining/pattern paper from a patchwork shape or onlay of some kind? or a gilding pattern?
My other guess is a tattoo pattern. Would book covers have been decorated that way?
It looks like a man on a horse with a lance when rotated 180 degrees, but then I’ve seen camels and whales in clouds.
I don’t know about camels and whales, but I just now happened to see Carol’s sand-covered mussels! If you look at it just right, each spot becomes the tip of a blackish-purple mussel sticking up out of the sand, like the mussels in this picture, only more spread-out.
But it’s not sand-covered mussels. It *does* have to do with punctures and transferring images, but it’s not the device that powder would have passed through…
I can’t imagine anything closer to a stencil than the very paper on which the pattern has been transferred .
See Erin’s reveal over at “A print pricked for transfer”.