Show #43/7404. Behind The Scenes At Biltmore

Tracery

Eric noticed on the table the tracery Don designed and it's beautiful, but yet not super complicated. It is something that any one of our viewers could do for a special occasion. Don agrees. It would work for a Christmas dinner decoration for example. The tracery kind of hearkens back to when the house was first built during the Gilded Age, in the Victorian times. This was something that the Victorians believed in, putting greenery on their table, whether it was in a container or even down on the surface. Tracery is one of the things that they used quite a bit. And anyone can do it at home. Eric would like for Don to talk us through the way that we would compose it. Don explains, let's say you're doing cuttings from a Christmas tree. Just cut them in smaller pieces, overlap them, overlap them, keep overlapping. If you've got a center point, you can even do a center point. You can start going in one direction overlapping that way and then turn and go to the opposite direction overlapping. That way you have most of your end points covered. That's really important, to keep the ends covered so it's all overlapping and it looks continuous and it makes a beautiful statement when it's completed. Eric agrees and the way Don has explained a tracery it seems rather simple, yet it's super elegant. Eric tells Don he sees a tracery in his future this Christmas.