Monday, September 24, 2012

Thank You Cards

One important task after weddings is, of course, thank you cards.  My wonderful husband and I perused many options throughout several stores to find a thank you card that we wanted to use.  It was not an easy task.

We finally found a blank card with a silver foil border around a blank front.  I offered to hand-calligraph the fronts.  This became a bit of an arduous task in that as a historic calligrapher, I have tended to focus on hands (aka fonts or alphabets for those who are not familiar with the terminology) that are not commonly used on things like wedding cards.

Gothic Textura Quadrata didn't flow well with the foil card design, looking awkward and out of place.  Humanist is boring, and Uncial looked out of place, along with another handful of options.  So I took a bit of a risk and dusted off my skills at Chancery Italic, which I haven't used since college.  It was rocky to say the least.  I really struggled to get the letters to sit at the right vertical angle, and futzed for what seemed like hours to find a flourish design that wasn't over the top, imbalanced, and messy.

I have a new found respect for modern calligraphers now.  I also finally found a good reason to use my purple ink.

Unfortunately not all papers are created equal, and the card paper was not ideal for calligraphy.  It did bleed a bit, and didn't flow well.  But the job is done, and most of them turned out decent enough to actually use.


Thursday, September 13, 2012

Wedding Favor

My husband and I recently celebrated a combined wedding reception on the East Coast with my Father-in-Law and his new bride.  Joe asked me to design a coffee mug with our names and wedding dates to be given out as wedding favors.

At first I was hesitant, because I thought it would be silly to do hand calligraphy on something that could be done by computer much more quickly and uniformly.  Then Justin explained that I had creative license to design something between the names.  Interest piqued. 


I went with a Gothic Textura Quadrata hand with some cadel flourishes.  I was sorely tempted to doctor up the results in photoshop, as numbers are a particular weakness of mine, but I let them fly with all their glorious imperfections.  I then designed a fleur de lis within lined flourishes, and an infinity symbol featuring the word "Love."  The mugs turned out quite nice.

We're all sweaty after several hours of dancing (with crazy party favors!)

Laughing through the "posed" picture

Super sweet picture of my parents (notice the wedding favors on the table behind them!)