Imperfectly Period

Stumbled across this while going through old papers.  My first pseudo-attempt at calligraphy from about 30 years ago.

This December I had the chance to make a long-term service principality award for someone with a Slavic persona.  Honestly, I forgot the details so I may be misremembering, but basically I used a page from the Peresopnytsia Gospel as inspiration because it was appropriate for the recipient so if I use the incorrect term for the persona, apologies.   My Laurel, Yrsa Kettilsdottir, and the Principality Scribe, Dáma Maminka the Bohemian, kept poking me about documenting the process so you get a ton of bad photos because I'm not a photographer!    My spouse also got a few sheets of goatskin and I thought I'd use the smallest piece of it for this project.  I think it was about 7" square?  Not very big at all.  I used the flesh side because it's supposed to be smoother, but as you can see from this first picture it had a suede-like texture.     I read online that pumice stone is recommended for smoothing so I grabbed my unused...

  One of these days I'll remember to take photos in good light, but that is not this day.  I really like this one, due in no small part to the simplicity of the design.  I also love how annoyed Goliath looks as he's dying.  Unfortunately, I forgot the blood splatter that was supposed to come out of his neck!

Salon is basically like a school science fair: you get to display and infodump your particular interest(s). Mine was "Anyone Can Scribe, Including You, You Can't Change My Mind." I made a bunch of scribal trading cards of simple, funky, and/or geometric art from across the world before the 17th century.  There were tips for hesitant calligraphers: calligrams/micrography, speech bubbles, invented languages, less than perfect calligraphers, even transliteration. 99% (a few escaped without) had the source on the back, my name, this blog, and a Bob Ross quote and I gave them away at the end of the event. I should have included a caveat that the potential scribe had to be able to hold a pen and perceive 2 dimensional media because one friend challenged me with hand tremors.  I pointed out the  Tremulous Hand of Worcester  and even then WORDSMITHING IS STILL SCRIBAL! ...

These are calligraphy for principality charters, which is why there are bits of white-out here and there and some smudges since the digital scribe can easily clean those up.   This one is transliterated from English using phonetic alphabets from Rezansky . 

  This was when I was still forgetting to take photos of the finished product and I wasn't entirely happy with this one because you might not have noticed, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist.