Well Versed In 1 John

You know what? I'm still in Europe (just like I was the last time a post was published) but I've written this in advance so you can get your Hilary fix even when I'm far away.

And it's another one of my church/calligraphy projects! Yay! About a month ago I had the privilege of doing three repetitive calligraphy projects in a row. It's fine. There's nothing like having a Red Sox game to keep me and my nibs company (especially when their offense is so impressive and deep). Lest I digress into my favorite topic of all, I'll get back to the point. One project was for money (no pictures taken because I forgot), one was because church ladies asked and the final was a gift. I already showed you the project that I was asked to do (the rose tags) and this is the project I did as a gift.

I loved the way it turned out. And so did the 30 women for whom the verse cards were made. A few Christmases ago, I sent out cards with glittered Holy Cards of St. Nicholas on the front. Perhaps you recall. Well, the company that I bought that cardstock from was having a buy one get one free sale so in addition to the red paper that I bought for those Christmas cards, I got a stack of pale green paper that had a shimmery look to it. It's nice and thick, too. I always figured I'd think of a purpose for it, but two years of looking at it and I'm no closer to having a use for it than I was when I got it for free. I thought it would be the perfect cardstock to use for these Bible verse cards. So I cut the folding cards into two flat cards each (which, by the way, means I only made a dent into the huge stack of green cardstock I've still got) so that I had 30 flat cards. Then I took some thick vellum paper and cut it to fit using my mini paper cutter. I cut 30 little snippets of ribbon, each sized to hang off the edges a bit of the cardstock. Next, because I like to make things difficult, I jumped into my mom's hand-me-down button collection and found 30 buttons that I thought would match the ribbon and paper colors (trying to keep a Spring pallet in mind). And then, I used my favorite craft tool ever, my drimmel with its diamond-edge drill bit, to cut the "button" part off of these buttons so they'd glue on flat.

And to the sounds (and sights thanks to MLB online) of Red Sox baseball -- an afternoon game I believe -- I wrote the same verse 30 times in a row. Without stopping. As the scripting went along (and the innings breezed past), I noticed that a few styles of scripting seemed to emerge. I tried to capture some of them here. The top picture features a script that is airy than the next picture, which seems dense. And some versions were more cursive than others. As a note, the first "r" of this verse comes in the 20th word, which is odd. I thought I'd throw that out there because I always antagonize over the letter "r" and I was pleasantly surprised to get so many words without having to write that one.

Of course, I can't mention the letter "r" without thinking of my mom's favorite riddle: Railroad crossing, watch out for cars, can you spell that without any r's?