Minor delay since Part Five due to my home computer’s hard drive starting to do itself in! I haven’t lost any files, thankfully, and I was also backing up this particular project’s files on Google Drive, but most of the recent long weekend was lost to tech support nonsense and troubleshooting. Now I just have to wait for the replacement hard drive to arrive… and then reinstall my OS on it… then transfer all my files from the old failing hard drive before it does, in fact, completely fail… computers are fun.
Anyway, on to heraldry!
Part six finishes up the paly fields, pauses briefly at a pair of party of six devices, then starts the long trek through the per bend devices!
My hands-down favourite in this batch is Alexandra Gangefeyr’s “Per bend flory counterflory Or and sable” in the middle of the bottom row. Black and gold is always a good colour combination and the flory counterflory line (alternating fleur-de-lise, basically) is a very elegant one.
Reta de Flintbeke’s “Per bend embowed counter-embowed Or and azure, pale two leaves issueant from the line of division counterchanged.” (rightmost in the middle row) might win a prize for the longest blazon text in this project, and it might also win a spot on my list of devices I am going to re-do because I’m still not happy with the look of the two leaves in the middle.
Sigeric of Ravenstone’s “Per bend azure and bendy sinister argent and azure” (leftmost middle row) tripped me up when I first looked at it because it’s the first device on my long list that has different field treatments on each side of the major line of division (the per bend line). Mentally adding a bit of punctuation can help decipher blazons like this: “Per bend, azure, and bendy sinister argent and azure.” is messier than it needs to be for a proper blazon but helps parse out the design – pure blue against the top edge of the shield, diagonal stripes of blue and silver (white) only below the per bend line on the lower left half.
