A lot of the stamp dies I’ve made so far are of motifs that are pretty common and pots often have stamped patterns that just use one or two motifs in repeating bands. In some cases, the pattern may involve a more complex arrangement of stamps, and this particular pot is one of them. For those of you who know me in person, you may recall the pot that reminds me vaguely of Jake the Dog from the cartoon “Adventure Time.” It is this example of a late 6th-century Frankish vessel found in Vellmar, Germany, and now in the collection of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel. The drawing of the pot shown above is from the original article publishing the find (or scroll to bottom of this page for bibliography).
Three stamps make up the design: a small 3×7 grid rectangle, a “W” shape, and a semi-circular stamp with narrow teeth. The semicircular stamp is used in an alternating position to create the undulating line, and if you look closely in the museum database photos (visit link above for high-res), you can see the areas of where the ends of the stamp impressions overlap in a few places on the pot (indicated by arrows). Below is a test impression as I was working on the three stamps needed to replicate this pot. For the final version, I will need a wider piece of antler for the semicircular stamp, but the other two are pretty close to the original scale.
And here’s a test pot using the stamps. I went a little smaller than the original, so this is about soup-bowl sized and doesn’t fit as many repeats of each stamp as the example pot, but I think it turned out well.
Source: Niemeyer, Wilhelm. 1957. ‘Kleine Beitrage: Ein bemerkenswerter merowingischer Fund aus Niedervellmar bei Kassel’ in Zeitschrift für hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde 68. 209-212.
farolfvs me fecit 