What’s the difference between a calligrapher and a scribe?

It’s true that in general English usage, there’s not much to choose between the words ‘calligrapher’ and ‘scribe.’ As with so many synonyms in English, the two derive from different languages of origin – Greek and Latin respectively, here – and they mean pretty much the same thing. When Jews say ‘scribe,’ though, we tend to mean one very specific thing: someone who knows the Jewish law pertaining to the writing of certain sacred texts and has the technical skill to write them. Each of these requirements can take years of study to meet.

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New Art Print: Fiber Artist's Oath

by Terri

The oath is the perfect gift for the fiber artist in your life. It's also a great treat for your own craft room wall.

How It Came To Be:

It all started with an IM conversation:

Ariela Housman: isn't it a shame that geeks never knit
and i would have no reason whatsoever to make geeky knitting art
Terri Ash: Not a single one
Ariela Housman: ....
KNITTER'S OATH!!!!
aaaah, why did i never think of this before?!?1

I'm an avid knitter, to the point where I have assembled plans to open a yarn shop.* Naturally, this meant talking to Ariela, and thus the above conversation. Ariela's brain is amazing at making cross-connections, and she'd been working really hard on the SysAdmin's Oath. And so the seeds began sprouting. Since Ariela sews rather than knits, she knew that the theme needed to be expanded. In addition, we wanted to recognize every form of fiber arts we know the geek world embraces - knitting, spinning,** needlepoint, weaving, sewing and crochet. Thus, the Fiber Artist's Oath.

The text was a collaborative effort between the two of us, which we then ran by other fiber artist friends to make sure we hadn't left anything out.*** After quite a bit of culling, we still ended up with the longest oath that we've ever made. Ariela asked me for suggestions for tools to include in the border art, and really managed to fit most of them in. The art is similar to the other oaths on the site, but you will notice a distinct lack of curves and tangles emblematic of the other oaths.**** This is because after making both the full Cordthulhu and the mini one contained in the SA's Oath, Ariela was tired of trying to create tangles that look both aesthetically pleasing and pleasingly random and balanced. This is quite the difficult task, and we don't get art if we push the artist too hard. It's possible that there might have been tangled yarn if Ariela hadn't been banging her head against the other art, but the process was making her more than a little itchy. So in the end, the art is comprised of the tools and raw materials that fiber artists use.

 

The Fiber Artist's Oath is available for $45. 

 

 

*You'll start to notice a theme around here - neither Ariela nor I are very good at limiting ourselves to one project at a time. I'm a little better at it, which is why I'm the resident killjoy for Ariela's grand dreams.

**That person in the back of the panel with the weird rotating thing making thread - they're spinning.

***Turns out we had - neither of us had thought of repetitive stress injuries.

****You'd think they belonged here - yarn gets tangled a LOT.

Amateur's Adventures in Illuminated Manuscript-land

by Ariela

I'm working on a project based on Medieval and Renaissance manuscript illuminations right now. To get a more thorough and instinctive feel for the aesthetic, I spent an afternoon at the Harold Washington Library branch of the Chicago Public Library looking at non-circulating books.

In particular, I went through all the image plates in Lilian M.C. Randall's Images In The Margins Of The Gothic Manuscripts, all 739 of them (they were numbered). It was...a bit of a culture shock. I'm passingly familiar with Medieval illumination, but this was a whole new level.

Tropes of Medieval Illuminations: Let Me Show You Them

To put it mildly, there are a lot of tropes of illuminations. Everything I am about to recount is probably old hat to someone who knows their stuff. I knew some of them going in, but I was totally not prepared for what I found. Be forewarned, the following is not particularly safe for work.

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New Greeting Card: Take Care of Yourself

by Ariela

A spoon-clutching little dragon is now ready to help you tell people you care about to care for themselves!

How it came to be:

A little while ago my friend Caitlín Rosberg remarked,

Sometimes I just horde my spoons in my fists like a treasure-hungry dragon and wave my hands at the screen going "nooooo noooo they're all mine noooo you can't have them."

(Spoon Theory is a method of explaining the expenditure of mental resources. It was coined by Christine Miserandino to explain how living with chronic illness depletes one's mental and emotional resources.)

Because my brain works the way it does, this sounded like perfect fodder for a greeting card admonishing the recipient to take care of themselves. After much doodling, this doleful little critter emerged.

I know dragons in various Asian mythologies don't tend to be portrayed as hoarding creatures. But the English-speaking SFF world is already over-saturated with European mythology and I am not interested in perpetuating that trend. But a soup spoon, a wooden spoon, and a measuring spoon are not much of a hoard. And voila!

Like all of our greeting cards, the Take Care of Yourself card is available singly for $4.00 and as a pack of 6 for $20.00.

Dispelling two common myths about calligraphy

by Ariela

When I tell people I am a professional calligrapher, I get a lot of different responses, everything from "Wow!" to "That's a thing?" But two comments I hear the most are "I could never do that, my handwriting is terrible!" and "You must have a lot of patience." 

Today I would like to put these misconceptions out of their misery. Or at least try.

Misconception number one: you must have good handwriting to be a calligrapher

I can't speak for all calligraphers, but when I do calligraphy, I use a completely different process than when I am writing anything else. My equipment is different, the way I hold the pen is different, and the motions I make are entirely different. I have a sneaking suspicion that if my brain were scanned while I was writing a shopping list vs. calligraphing a text, different parts of my brain would light up.

My calligraphy is relentlessly regular. My actual handwriting is actually all over the map. When I am writing slowly it is reasonably neat, but when I write quickly it gets sloppy very quickly. Here is an example of something I jotted down for myself recently:

Yes, I scribbled the date and location of Troi and Riker's wedding on the back of an envelope.

Yes, I scribbled the date and location of Troi and Riker's wedding on the back of an envelope.

Looks totally different than my calligraphic hands. (Honestly it looks like a combo of my parents handwriting.)

If you want to learn to do calligraphy, it doesn't matter what your handwriting looks like. You must be able to hold a pen for extended periods; hold your hand steady; draw a short, straight line; and draw a curve. If you can do that, you can learn calligraphy. Some people, for many good reasons, cannot do these things. And while this might also lead them to have less legible handwriting, poor handwriting is not the reason they wouldn't be able to do calligraphy. Correlation not being causality and all that jazz.

Misconception number two: you must be really patient to do calligraphy

I have a hard time not scoffing whenever I hear this one. I'm a very impatient person. Perhaps not more than the average person, but I can only see what goes on inside my own head. Really, I am not patient. What I am is tenacious, perfectionist, meticulous, and stubborn as all get-out. If all  you see is me sitting, making stroke after deliberate stroke with my pen, yeah, it might look like patience. But it's being fueled by something very different.

In one respect I suppose it is kind of true that you must be patient, in that calligraphy is not a craft that you can pick up quickly. I had been doing calligraphy as a hobby for seven years before I apprenticed to a professional. I went through 3 months of apprenticeship before I was even allowed to do the smallest bits of jobs for clients. I did small professional jobs for two years before I started doing bigger ones. Even now it takes a while to complete any one piece.

So yeah, I spend a lot of time perfecting my craft. But so does any artist. Or author. Or athlete. And probably lots of other professions starting with other letters. But I bet that Yo-Yo Ma, N.K. Jemisin, and Serena Williams don't get told "Wow, you must have so much patience" in response to their explanations of their careers, even before they became famous.

So just because you are an impatient person, don't think that you cannot do calligraphy. Sometimes it will be hard and boring, yes, but if you want it enough, it will be worth getting through that time to get to the reward at the end.