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.