A Cunning Plan (otherwise known as Wedding calligraphy #2)

Actually just a table plan, but I thought a cunning plan sounded more interesting. Back in my post about place cards I mentioned that my pictures of the table plan-in-progress had got eaten somewhere between memory card and computer - I am happy to announce that my husband is a genius and has caused them to reappear from the abyss.

Laid out but not mounted yet.

So, my table plan consisted of 5 tables of 9 all named after various places in One Hundred Acre Wood. After seeing some invites printed and overlaid with vellum paper, I thought I'd use a similar idea and write out the names on vellum paper and mount this over cornflower Khadi paper (the idea being that you could still see the flowers through the overlaid paper). All this mounted on some Ivory Canford card and stuck in a nice frame would look lovely.

I think it did look nice in the end, but writing copperplate on vellum paper is not to be attempted lightly (or if you have a short temper). The trouble is that vellum paper (and we're talking vellum paper, as opposed to proper Vellum here) doesn't absorb ink very well. Or at all, really. If you try and use gouache then the paper crinkles up and you loose the intensity of colour as it dries; if you use ink (I used Moon Palace Sumi ink in the end) it keeps it's lovely intensity but takes a long time to dry. The surface tended to be both skiddy and scratchy all at the same time - in short an absolute nightmare to write on. I attempted most of the tables at least twice, and found it really difficult to control uneven descenders and wobbly ascenders. Persistence, however, paid off and I finally had an acceptable version of each for the finished thing. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you prepare the surface with gum sandarac then writing on vellum paper becomes a lot easier - unfortunately I had neither the time nor the means to experiment with this before needing the finished thing.

Cutting and sticking materials.

Other important equipment for assembling the plan can be seen on the right and include: a putty rubber, a prit-stick, scissors, a soft pencil, double sided tape, a very sharp scalpel + cutting mat (be careful with these!), and a metal ruler.
The nice thing about khadi papers is that they can be torn along the edge of a ruler giving you a nice straight edge, but maintaining the nice ragged, rustic look of the natural edges.




All in all I think it turned out rather well considering I'd never attempted anything like it before, and was really just making it up seat-of-the-pants style. The finished thing, mounted and framed looked like this:

(Photo courtesy of the wonderful Kirsten Hunter)

Aside from the aforementioned trouble with the vellum paper, if I were to do a similar piece again I'd probably double mount the tables with a stronger colour behind the khadi paper (perhaps dark purple or blue), and include a similarly mounted title at the top (either simply 'Table Plan' or the Bride and Groom's names and wedding date) to prevent it looking a little bit on the naked side. We live and learn!

Tomorrow, I'm very excited to be heading into London to attend the CLAS Living Letter IV exhibition: All that Glisters at the Oxo Gallery on the South Bank. It'll also be visiting the Design Centre at Sunderland University, and Bath Central Library over the coming weeks, so do go along if you have the opportunity - it features beautiful works from some of the country's top calligraphers and I am anticipating being truly inspired by their skill (I've had a sneak peak at the catalogue and know I won't be disappointed). I'll report back here once I've recovered!

The Death of the Letter?

(courtesy of Jenny Mackness. CC licensed)

Controversy in the British Press today as Royal Mail announce a 30% increase in stamp prices . A first class stamp is going to rise from 46p to 60p, and second class will go from 36p to 50p; I remember a time when a first class stamp was 27p, and it wasn't that long ago (10 years to be exact).

If the comments on the BBC article are anything to go by, reactions to this news have been mixed to say the least. Many are proclaiming the death of the handwritten letter (I suspect these to be the same people who believe that ebooks spell the demise of the printing press and real books along with it); some think that the elderly will suffer most and it is our social duty to teach them all how to use email; some believe that something ought to be done, but not this (strangely lacking in other bright ideas as to how to tackle the issue though - funny that); and there are a few brave souls who have put their hands up to say they think it's a good idea, and that 60p is a small price to pay for "a physical item, collected within a short walk from your house, transported to the other end of the country and put through a specific door, all within 24-48 hours" - foolhardy behaviour indeed in a BBC comments section where such reasonable and well expressed opinions are not much appreciated by the anonymous lurking populous.

What has all this got to do with Calligraphy I hear you cry? Regular readers of this blog will know that I am member of two envelope exchange groups through the CLAS Copperplate Special Interest Group.They run on a 6 monthly cycle and you work your way through your list of names and addresses sending an envelope you have designed and written to a different person each month - if everything works smoothly then by the end of the cycle each group member has received an envelope from each of the other members.

(courtesy of whistlepunch. CC licensed)

What with one thing and another I had got a little bit behind with my envelopes recently, and yesterday I made my way to the Post Office with 4 envelopes in hand ready to go off to various locations around the world. I can't remember the exact cost, but in total it came to about £1.30 - one of the envelopes was going to Ireland, one to Australia, and two were staying in this country (all first class). In my opinion that is a bargain. Will the price rise put me off from continuing with the envelope exchange? No. Would I be happy to pay a bit more for this service to continue? Yes, most definitely. Each month I receive beautifully written and designed envelopes (the most recent of which also included an exquisite hand illustrated moth on the front) from all over the world; for 60p you can keep them coming!

Whilst reading the various reactions to this story a few things have come to my attention that piqued me into writing this post in the first place:

• The repeated assertion that such an enormous and unjustified price rise will drive people ever further towards 'free' types of communication such as email. Err, excuse me? This must be some new meaning of the word 'free' then. Last time I bought a computer it cost over £300 pounds (it only lasted 2 years) and that certainly didn't include access to the internet. So the argument that we should persuade the [hard up] elderly to forget paying 50p for a stamp, and instead pay ~£500 for a computer and goodness-knows-how-much on broadband provision isn't really going to fly - they're not stupid you know.

• There's no guarantee that your mail will be delivered to the right place, or won't get 'lost'. To be fair, there's no guarantee that your email won't end up languishing in somebody's spam folder either (or get lost in thin air for that matter - it's happened before). And there's an awful lot more to go wrong with a computer than a pen and paper; when have you ever experienced the blue screen of death when writing a good old fashioned letter? The worst that could happen is you can't find a pen...

• The assumption that most people who write letters and use the post (for personal correspondence) are a) old, and b) only do so because they are incapable of using any other means of communication. Given that I am not yet 30 years old, I have not quite written myself off as 'old'. I am also quite clearly capable of using a computer when I put my mind to it. I write and send letters because I choose to. Shocking, isn't it? I also enjoy receiving letters in return, and firmly believe that the art of letter writing is not yet dying, and the romance of receiving letters is far from dead. The only people who would have you believe so are to be pitied, because they are missing out on both.

Wedding calligraphy #1

Here's a sneaky peak at some of the place cards I wrote out for my wedding in February. The colour scheme included creams and purples, so for the place cards I mixed some purple gouache and used it with a Brause 66EF nib.

The names were originally written on standard ivory tent-style place cards (from Hobbycraft), but once we'd decided to get the favours from the world famous Grasmere gingerbread shop Sarah Nelson's, I cut each 'tent' in half to give a flat card and tucked them inside a strip of ribbon tied round each box.

Elizabeth is officially the most gorgeous name to write in Copperplate. More people should call their daughters Elizabeth.

I had great fun practicing some little flourishes to add to each of the names. Some lend themselves more naturally to this approach than others, but trying to find something to add to every name was a nice challenge.

I had a lot of positive feedback from our guests, with many of them saying that they'd be keeping their cards as a memento of the day. Unfortunately I don't yet have any pictures of the cards in situ, but I hope that one might crop up somewhere.

I also wrote out our table plan in copperplate. My pictures of this, as a work in progress, got eaten on the journey from the camera to the computer :-( but I should be able to obtain some pictures of the finished thing to share with you soon. The creation of the table plan is worthy of an entire post on it's own! (now there's something to look forward to).

Stop gap...

I have been terribly remiss about posting the last few weeks; not because I haven't got anything to show for myself - in fact I've been doing lots of lettering - I'm just lacking the time to take some pretty pictures and post properly!

For the moment, here's a link to an excellent calligraphy blog with some amazingly beautiful lettering. This particular post gives very useful step-by-step instructions on how to recover small mistakes - very handy indeed, and very kindly shared expertise by the Constant Scribe.

How to save an Envelope

Stay tuned for some photos of recent work, just as soon as I have five minutes!